Two new reasons to revisit Joni Mitchell's remarkable catalogue
We sang Joni Mitchell's 'Both Sides Now' at my eighth-grade graduation in suburban New Jersey in 1971. It ruined the song for me for decades. That said, I have always loved Mitchell. Of course I have. My generation grew up to a soundtrack of 'Court and Spark,' 'Blue,' 'Ladies of the Canyon' and 'Hissing of Summer Lawns.' In recent years, I have played 'Chelsea Morning' at the start of every day, just to set the tone.
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Our Government Sent Him to D-Day to Make Art About the Invasion. It Changed His Life Forever.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. On June 6, 1944, my great-uncle, the combat artist Mitchell Jamieson, stood on a Tank Landing Ship with hundreds of other soldiers waiting to join the assault waves and demolition parties already heading to Utah Beach. In his description of his painting of that morning, Dawn of D-Day Off of France, he recalled the freighted tension of the moment: These men … could only wonder what awaited them as they stared at the distant coastline, barely discernible. The boats, suspended on davits above their heads, expressed oddly in their dark shapes the taut, waiting threat of this dawn off the Normandy coast. Hours later he would come ashore with a .45 pistol, pencils, and a sketchbook. Living in a foxhole on the beach, Mitchell spent the next week documenting the death and destruction wrought by the largest amphibious invasion in history, the turning point of World War II. He was 28 years old. The U.S. had used combat artists to capture the action in World War I, and early in World War II, the military determined that they were once again crucial to galvanizing popular support. George Biddle, a muralist who became the chair of the War Department Art Advisory Committee, laid out the mission, advising his artists: Express if you can, realistically or symbolically, the essence and spirit of war. You may be guided by Blake's mysticism, by Goya's cynicism and savagery, by Delacroix's romanticism, by Daumier's humanity and tenderness; or better still follow your own inevitable star. High-minded exhortations aside, the making of art out of war must also be, by necessity, a propaganda mission, to justify the effort and expense. The World War II combat artists would, implicitly, reveal the bravery, heroism, and resilience of 'our boys.' Though a photograph might simply show a slaughter—as Mathew Brady's Civil War work famously did—a painting could soften the raw carnage, allude to epic themes, and offer meaning and solace in the face of inestimable loss. My great-uncle Mitchell and I overlapped in this world only briefly, and across a continent. To mark my birth, he gave my parents a black-and-white drawing of the Apollo mission capsule floating on dark waters, which I like to think he meant as a metaphor for my own recent landing on Earth. We never met, though; I was born in San Francisco in 1974, and he killed himself in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1976. Throughout my childhood I heard vague rumblings about Mitchell, but knew him only by his later iconic work for NASA, which my parents always pointed out to me when we visited the Air and Space Museum. But I had no idea that he'd been a New Deal artist, painted for the Roosevelts at Hyde Park, and traveled the world as a Life magazine correspondent. The family shame around Mitchell's violent death prevented me from understanding his full legacy, and ultimately circumscribed the meaning of his life and art. About a year and a half ago, I discovered that Mitchell's correspondence, sketchbooks, and hundreds of pieces of artwork were still in the family, stored in the 1800s townhouse in Alexandria where he'd spent most of his adult life, where he died by suicide, and where his son, Craig, still lives. I reached out to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and they were interested in a donation of Mitchell's papers, most of which hadn't been touched since his death. As I began helping Craig unearth the sheaves of Mitchell's records, photographs, and drawings, I became intrigued by his life and the significant role he'd played, almost haphazardly it seemed, in many of the pivotal events of the 20th century. It is an odd thing to become acquainted with a family member decades after their death, and doubly strange when this person was a well-known artist in their time. Mitchell's astonishing art spoke to me first, his intricate visual renderings of everything from military tanks and orphaned children to shells and flowers. His sketchbooks, in particular, about 80 of them in the family collection, offer a remarkable record of his working style as an artist, the rapidity with which he drew, his ability to capture details in high-stress moments, his delicate notations of colors to add when he later painted from the sketches ('water grey-green, blue reflections'). But in exploring this archive, it is his voice as a writer and a thinker that has surprised me most. Knowing him as a visual artist, I was prepared to see through his eyes; I was not prepared for his poetry, his prose. Mitchell composed descriptions of his combat artwork, over 500 pieces of which have been collected by the Naval History and Heritage Command, and his writing provides context for each piece. Some of his notes are literally scrawled on the back—the verso in artistic terms—of the art, while others were clearly composed and submitted when the pieces were given over to the Navy. These descriptions range from straightforward accounts to lyrical observations, short essays, and scraps of poignant reportage from the field. On a simple pen-and-ink drawing, Waiting for Burial, Cemetery Above the Beach, he included direct quotes ('told to the artist') from an unnamed sergeant grappling with the challenge of burying thousands of American, British, and German corpses in a war zone: Why, when we landed we didn't know what to do or where to start. Bodies everywhere you looked and firing going on all around you. Some of the officers of another outfit wanted to use a bulldozer [to bury the dead] but our lieutenant said no, we'd do the job proper and decent. In the sketch, four covered bodies represent the anonymous dead, but the verso reveals the real savagery of the beach scene. Mitchell described the 'apologetic' tone of the sergeant when he acknowledged how the horrifying task and the sickening smell had become routine. In this exchange we see his encompassing role as an artist correspondent on the battlefield: the listener, the watcher, the witness to it all. Before Normandy, Mitchell had been embedded with a convoy to North Africa, and landed at the invasion of Sicily, where his sketchbooks were soaked through, and men all around him were hit by shrapnel. From Europe, he was sent to Iwo Jima, where 'every square foot of earth seemed to be torn or pockmarked by shell fire and shrapnel,' and then Okinawa. Craig remembers his father telling stories of a Japanese kamikaze plane dive-bombing and hitting the aircraft carrier he was aboard. In an interview with the Washington Post, Mitchell described his work from that time as 'filled with pleasure of drawing, of fighting with men I loved, the exhilaration of color and war.' He learned of the atomic attack on Hiroshima from a shipboard broadcast. 'I was glad,' he said in the same interview. 'I wanted the war to end. I hated those bastards.' The combat artist role is inherently paradoxical. In Mitchell's art and writing it's evident that he's straddling the line between surviving and creating, being in the action and observing the action, capturing the details while not losing the larger picture. In contrast to war photography, visual art requires a longer, intimate engagement with the moment. It demands conceiving, sketching, lingering; it demands time. In the chaos of the battlefield, he became aware of all the moving pieces and terrible nuances: German prisoners so relieved to be out of the fighting that they'd salute when approached; the truck called the 'meat wagon' which transports the dead; the 'slow, steady and appalling' work of burying the fallen. And in the midst of this, he recognized the frustrating impossibility of seeing and expressing it all, what he later described as a 'gnawing dissatisfaction and awareness of the disparity between the enormity of the tragic subject and one's own trivial effort.' After three years of service, Mitchell returned from World War II with a Bronze Star and the foundation of a successful career in the arts. He had a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery, his paintings were included in an exhibit called 'Operation Palette,' which toured the country for five years, and he won two Guggenheim fellowships. He started teaching at art schools nationally, and eventually landed a tenure-track position at the University of Maryland. During this time, his perspective on his combat service began to change, gradually it seems, and then all of a sudden. In a 1962 talk for the Society of Federal Artists and Designers, titled Razzmatazz and Tatterdemalion: The Myth of the Useful Artist, he shared his ambivalence about his role as documentarian and propagandist for the US Navy: For a period of three years, during the Second World War, I occupied a position in the U.S Navy known as Combat Artist. According to your predilection, this designation will seem either a contradiction in terms or a natural state of affairs …The war experience left me with a curious duality in my art and in my thought. On the one hand, my painting reflected a great and universal theme, of concern to everyone. Recognition for it was not lacking, stemming as much, I am sure, from the subject matter as from my mastery of my craft and art. There was, on my part, a gratifying sense of fulfilling both a useful public role and a personal potential for development at the same time. On the other hand … the sense of being manipulated by vast forces. It was these 'vast forces' that made him want to understand what was really going on in the Vietnam War, beyond the news reports. In the summer of 1967, he reprised his role on the battlefield, this time as a civilian volunteer artist under the auspices of the Office of Military History. Visiting Saigon, Pleiku, and Dak To, he filled sketchbooks and took hundreds of photos. Sickness forced him back to the United States after less than a month, but he had seen enough to transform his life and art forever. If Mitchell's World War II combat art built his career, then his obsession with Vietnam destroyed it. My grandfather, usually a reserved man, opened up to a journalist about his brother's state of mind after going to Southeast Asia: 'For two years he had insomnia. Ludy [Mitchell's wife] said she heard nothing but Vietnam for six years after he got back.' Through all those sleepless nights he painted and listened to Vietnamese music and read 'every book published on Vietnam,' many of which are still in the Alexandria townhouse. He created an opus of work, still unfinished at his death, called 'The Plague,' which is both a reference to Albert Camus' book of the same title and the U.S. military itself. Mitchell's post-Vietnam art was prolific, pointedly political, and largely unsaleable. To render Vietnam, Mitchell became a new artist altogether. Gone is the heroic sense of comradery: the brave, grim-faced men piling onto boats to fight and die together. Now we see only black-and-white drawings, faces and bodies emerging from midnight splotches of ink. Mitchell felt the horror of this war should be captured in monochrome; color was by its very nature sensual and inappropriate. These drawings, he wrote, were 'composed in a spirit of cold fury, animated by an overwhelming sense of the obscene, insane, waste of young lives, and addressed to a new and revolutionary young consciousness.' The brutality, the viciousness of killing, and its aftermath are all documented, but also something else. A sense of claustrophobia, of trapped, hypocritical, pointless violence. Tortured, decapitated, castrated victims ringed in barbed wire; prostitutes suffering the affections of grinning, obese officers; grieving peasants wailing, hunched over dead children. While his World War II work is clearly reportage, here he goes beyond what he actually witnessed, imagining scenes in harrowing detail. His art pivots from stylized to surreal; if his early pieces had echoes of Edward Hopper, they now seem haunted by Hieronymus Bosch. Mitchell's anti-war crusade had real-life impacts, including delaying his tenure at the University of Maryland. Institutions which had once welcomed him back as a returning war hero refused to acknowledge his incendiary new body of work. In an unpublished article titled 'Das Kannibal,' Mitchell wrote angrily about being blackballed for speaking out against the war. The Defense Department, which had first invited him to Vietnam, declined to show 'The Plague' drawings, he said, suggesting that perhaps they could be exhibited in '50 years time' when they would be less controversial. The Smithsonian, too, turned their back on him (a cutting blow for an artist who'd lived in the D.C. area his whole life) because (Mitchell wrote) they were 'intimidated by celebrities like [Alexander] Calder' who threatened to withhold gifts of his art if they circulated an exhibit on the war. In a scathing rejection of his newest work, Bernard Quint, art director at Life magazine, wrote on Nov. 28, 1967, 'From looking at your drawings, I would gather that only American G.I.'s are guilty of poking their daggers into Christ-like Vietnamese and obviously Hanoi and the Viet Cong are blank pieces of paper which symbolize innocence.' The doors that were once opened to Mitchell now slammed shut, and he felt profoundly betrayed. 'No medals this time,' he told a Washington Post art critic. (I asked the Smithsonian and the Department of Defense for comment on the events Mitchell described. A spokesperson for the Smithsonian replied that they were unable to offer informed comment due to the time that has passed, and the Department of Defense did not reply to my request before press time.) All my life, I heard that the trauma of my great-uncle's visit to Vietnam killed him, and his obituaries and many of the articles about his life and legacy reflect this sentiment. But as I've learned more, I've started to question whether it was the three weeks he spent in Vietnam or the three years he served in World War II that led to his ultimate breakdown. In 'Das Kannibal,' Mitchell writes that Saigon 'brought back vividly to me the Algerian city of Oran in 1942-43 … first city I'd ever seen surrounded by the feverish activity of war-time.' Just over 20 years after the end of his World War II service, he returns to the battlefield and finds another formerly peaceful country overtaken by war. It is all too familiar, but now he is 20 years older, a reporter and not a soldier, his vision no longer clouded by the communal spirit of war. Standing apart from the machine, he sees it for what it truly is. Camus' The Plague is set in Oran, and with this connection in mind he christens his new series of unflinching depictions of massacre. This time, he seems to be saying, I will tell the truth about war, all the wars I have seen and all the wars to come. But how much of this was already brewing before Mitchell stepped foot in Indochina? In his 1976 eulogy at Mitchell's funeral, Lt. Cmdr. J. Burke Wilkinson described how Mitchell's art evolved during World War II: I heard he had gone to the Pacific … and we saw in Life his Iwo Jima pictures … the growing depth and compassion of his art … the terror and the beauty too … a sadder, harsher note, colors more disturbing … a sense of strain, exhaustion even …Later we heard he had been ordered home by the Head of the Art Unit and had begged to be allowed to stay. As a military man, Wilkinson would have known that 'strain' and 'exhaustion' could be signs of serious mental health deterioration. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder was not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association until 1980; before that it was known simply as combat or battle 'fatigue.' There's also evidence that the profusion of bodies and nightmarish scenes that characterize Mitchell's later work started to creep in before he went to Vietnam. The catalog for Mitchell's posthumous Corcoran show in 1979 notes that a group of dream-influenced paintings, including one called Fragments From the Apocalypse, were exhibited before he visited Vietnam, and closely resemble his painting The Saigon Follies, 'with its melange of grotesque images.' In going through the art in Craig's house, I've also come across pieces in the same surreal style that predate his Vietnam experience. It leads me to wonder: How long had Mitchell been suffering? Had he ever gotten help? I'm left with the uneasy sense that both my great-uncle's life and death have been misunderstood. We know that he'd witnessed countless losses in World War II, saw wounded men dying in agony, traveled the world to participate in some of the bloodiest battles history has ever seen. And his official duty was to bring this brutality to life on paper. While other men had terrible jobs, they also had the possibility of forgetting, putting the war behind them after their task was done. But Mitchell's charge was ongoing: to capture the slaughter in his mind's eye, to witness and remember and translate everything he had seen for the broader public. Once these images were seared into his memory, they tormented him and they emerged in his imagination, his dreams, his art. He could never forget. Could it be that Vietnam was the trigger, not the cause, of his self-inflicted demise? In 1964 Mitchell had an exhibition at the University of Maryland of work from World War II called 'On War: Drawings from the Arena,' pulled from his personal collection. On the postcard promoting the show, he quoted James Joyce's Ulysses, 'History is the Nightmare from which I am trying to Awaken.' Below he added this text to justify displaying his wartime artwork, these 'odds and ends of catastrophe found in history's wake': If it is asked why this assemblage of faces from a dusty picture, burning villages and cities, refugees and invasion armadas … should be presented at this time, one can only reply that for so many of us the longest day in history dawned, cheerless and cold, off the coast of Normandy twenty years ago. Mitchell survived that 'longest day' in body, but the damage to his spirit would only become evident two decades later in another land ravaged by a new American war. At such close range, sketchbook in hand, the repeating cycles of history proved too much to bear. In the last, he must have felt his only chance to awaken from the nightmare was to end the dream.
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Off the Grid: Sally breaks down USA TODAY's daily crossword puzzle, Raise Your Glass
There are spoilers ahead. You might want to solve today's puzzle before reading further! Raise Your Glass Constructor: Stella Zawistowski Editor: Anna Gundlach TUMBLER PIGEON (6D: Bird that does somersaults in flight) There are a number of different TUMBLER PIGEON breeds. They are varieties of the rock dove (also known as the rock PIGEON) that have been selected for their ability to roll over backwards during flight. This ability is thought to be a survival tactic to avoid aerial attacks from other birds. ACTOR (4A: Tom Holland or Tom Hollander) It's a fun decision to choose two ACTORs with similar names. ACTOR Tom Holland has played the role of Spider-Man in six MCU movies (2016-2021). ACTOR Tom Hollander's film credits include Gosford Park (2001), Pride and Prejudice (2005), and The Night Manager (2016-present). UHURA (14A: Zoe Saldana's "Star Trek" role) Zoe Saldaña first portrayed communications officer Nyota UHURA in the 2009 movie Star Trek, which is a reboot of the original Star Trek TV series. The movie featured the same main characters as the TV series, played by a new cast. Nichelle Nichols played the role of UHURA in the original series. Zoe Saldaña reprised the role of UHURA in the movies Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016). TAR PIT (21A: La Brea fossil excavation site) For tens of thousands of years, natural asphalt has seeped up from the ground in the Los Angeles, California area known as the La Brea TAR PITs. The TAR preserved the bones of animals unlucky enough to get caught in the pits centuries ago. The La Brea TAR Pits Museum displays fossils excavated from the TAR PITs. IRAQ (38A: Mosul's country) Mosul is a city located in northern IRAQ along the Tigris River. It is the second-most populous city in IRAQ after Baghdad. The ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh are located in Mosul. PEPSI (39A: Crystal ___ ('90s cola)) Crystal PEPSI was a clear cola that was sold from 1992 to 1994. BLUE (41A: The "B" in Roy G. Biv) Roy G. Biv (also seen as ROYGBIV) is a mnemonic used to remember the colors of the rainbow in order: red, orange, yellow, green, BLUE, indigo, and violet. PERU (42A: Country bordering Lake Titicaca) Lake Titicaca is the largest lake in South America. The freshwater lake is found in the Andes, on the border of Bolivia and PERU. TED (49A: "The Good Place" star Danson) The Good Place (2016-2020) is a TV series about a heaven-like utopia where humans spend their afterlife. TED Danson portrays Michael, an afterlife "architect" who designs the Good Place neighborhood where the main characters of the show reside. OBI (58A: ___-Wan Kenobi) Our Star Wars friend OBI-Wan Kenobi is making back-to-back puzzle appearances, as we saw this same clue yesterday. PIG LATIN (61A: Anguagelay okenspay ikelay isthay) Well, this is fun! (Although getting spell check to accept the spelling of these words was a bit of a challenge...) In case your PIG LATIN is rusty, this clue says, "Language spoken like this." GOBLET SQUAT (3D: Exercise done holding one dumbbell with both hands) A GOBLET SQUAT is a variation of a SQUAT in which a weight is held in front of the chest while performing the SQUAT. GOBLET SQUATs work your upper body muscles as well as your leg muscles. RASTA (8D: Worshipper of Jah) I have previously written about the religion known as Rastafari, or Rastafarianism, which developed in Jamaica in the 1930s. RASTA beliefs include monotheism, a belief in one God, who is referred to as Jah. ROTI (11D: ___ canai (Malaysian flatbread) ROTI canai is a popular breakfast and snack in Southeast Asia, especially in Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. The flatbread is made by rolling dough out until it is paper thin, and then rolling or folding it to create multiple layers. OHIO (58D: Cedar Point's state) Cedar Point is an amusement park in Sandusky, OHIO. The park is located on a peninsula that extends into Lake Erie. LOU (62D: Jazz composer Mary ___ Williams) Mary LOU Williams (1910-1981) was a jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote and arranged songs for many jazz artists, including Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. A couple of other clues I especially liked: THE L BOMB (19A: Word "dropped" in a deepening relationship) IT ME (2D: "omg i feel seen") GOBLET SQUAT (3D: Exercise done holding one dumbbell with both hands) TUMBLER PIGEON (6D: Bird that does somersaults in flight) MUG ROOT BEER (9D: Rival of Dad's and Barq's) RAISE YOUR GLASS: The top word of each vertical theme answer is a type of GLASS: GOBLET, TUMBLER, and MUG. The word RAISE in the title gave me a good idea that the theme would be found in the tops of vertical theme answers. It's nice that each GLASS is located such that it is being "raised" to the top of the grid. Thank you, Stella, for this enjoyable puzzle. USA TODAY's Daily Crossword Puzzles Sudoku & Crossword Puzzle Answers This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Crossword Blog & Answers for June 5, 2025 by Sally Hoelscher
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How True Hair Company Founder Karen Mitchell Turned a Side Hustle Into an Eight-Figure Hair Empire
From Rihanna to Demi Moore, Lizzo, and even Beyoncé, Hollywood's biggest stars have turned to True Hair Company for luxury hair extensions and wigs. But behind the glam is Karen Mitchell, a Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-bred entrepreneur who transformed a side hustle into an eight-figure business that's redefining the Black hair industry. The company not only supplies hair pieces for A-list celebrities, but also provides professional women, businesswomen, and the everyday fabulous woman with premium hair units and pieces, giving them the confidence they need to walk into any room while building their businesses and careers. Mitchell, a noted hair extension expert, launched True Indian Hair, the product brand under the umbrella of True Hair Company, after noticing a lack of diversity in ownership within the billion-dollar Black haircare industry. Coupled with her passion for hair and beauty, she embarked on a mission more than two decades ago to provide career women with high-quality extensions and wigs. 'I started True Hair Co/True Indian Hair in 2004 as a side hustle while working my 9-to-5,' she told BLACK ENTERPRISE. Initially, it was 'just something to make extra money for my social activities,' she said. However, she realized that selling imported Indian hair to friends and family was a lucrative business that eventually mirrored the $60,000 yearly salary she earned as a production coordinator in the fashion industry. 'So, when I got laid off from my 9-to-5 in 2006 and was unable to find another job, I decided to gamble on myself and open a store,' she said. With just $15,000 in savings, she cashed in her 401(k) retirement fund and used loans from family and friends to open the first official True Hair Company store in Brooklyn, New York, in 2007. 'It was the scariest decision of my adult life because I had no business knowledge outside of college economics classes. But I felt I had no other option.' Mitchell's lack of financing and experience as a full-time entrepreneur presented a new set of challenges, forcing her to survive on canned soup for months. She realized that stocking a hair store with bundles, closures, frontals, and wigs, along with purchasing stock goods for online orders, required hundreds of thousands of dollars in upfront costs. 'I didn't have the funding for that,' she said. 'The first two years, my store stock was pretty weak,' she admits. At the time, 'there was no other hair store in Brooklyn selling raw Indian hair, and everyone wanted some True Indian Hair. So, there was a huge demand for my product and customers were willing to wait,' she explained. The high demand forced her to learn what she calls 'the flipping game' quickly. 'I would sell and use the profits to buy twice the amount of the last order, and then three times the amount, and so on. Eventually, the positive cash flow flowed enough from flipping bundles to fully stocking my store.' Today, True Hair Company has become an eight-figure business, providing clientele with luxurious hair ethically sourced directly from donors in India. In addition to the original brick-and-mortar in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Mitchell also runs a 3,000 sq. ft, multi-level flagship store in the heart of Manhattan as well as a successful e-commerce website. 'True Indian Hair was one of those side hustles that evolved beyond a hustle into a real business. It wasn't planned, but once I saw the trajectory. I knew I had something special to offer,' she said. Beyond business success, Mitchell founded the nonprofit True Strength, which provides monthly hair and beauty makeovers to women who have experienced hair loss due to cancer-related treatments. Mitchell and her team intend to expand within the next couple of years to other markets, including Atlanta and New Jersey. Her long-term goals include franchising, launching a new haircare product line, and opening locations in Houston, Miami, Washington, Washington, D.C., and London. In an interview, the hair mogul shared insights about her journey, building her celebrity clientele, and strategies for those looking to launch or expand a business. BE: Where does your entrepreneurial spirit stem from? I have always had an entrepreneurial mindset since I was in high school and college. From selling Avon to selling bracelets out of catalogues, I just had a thing for business. My long-term goal was to open a hair salon. I think my entrepreneurial mindset comes from my mom, who sold commodities in Jamaica for a living. Also, my first job out of college was for a fashion company led by a woman. I stayed with that company for 10 years and, looking back, I now see how my boss influenced me as a woman in business. BE: What makes True Hair Company different from other hair extension and wig companies? We set our company apart by primarily focusing on ethically sourced raw Indian hair for our hair bundles and wigs. We have partnered with our factory in India and have our own team on hand in the factory to select only the best premium raw hair for our production. The quality control continues to our NYC hub where every piece of hair is rewashed to ensure there are no tangles or visible hair issues before it is sold to customers. Because of this, we have a less than 3% return or complaint rate. I think being a woman who actually wears my products has been a great asset. I look at every piece of hair as if it's going into my head. I'm not only the owner; I'm also a client. BE: How did you build and maintain relationships with celebrity clients? We have been blessed to have an amazing list of celebrity stylist and brands who trust our products for their clients. Normally, they will reach out to us with their specific needs. Yusef, who styles Rihanna, to Tokyo Stylez, who styles Cardi B, to Hairassasin, who styles JT, to Tym Wallace who styles Mary J. Blige and Taraji P. Henson, to Chis Appleton, who styles Kim Kardashian, and [celebrity hair stylist] Q Hardy, who has trusted our products from day one. This includes working with fashion brands such as LaQuan Smith for NYFW. They love and trust our quality, and we nurture those relationships. BE: What tips would you share with entrepreneurs struggling to generate revenue and build their business? Access to information for funding is easier now than it was when I started my journey almost 20 years ago. Small Business Loans (SML) are available for businesses to borrow for startup or reinvestment. There are also grants available for startups. I find that we sometimes do not do enough research in our communities. Information will not come to you. You have to seek it out. Start with Google. Visit your local chamber of commerce. They are there to serve you. Find a mentor to guide you and be a sounding board, but do so only after you have done your own research and can communicate your wants or needs. No one wants to help someone who doesn't want to help themselves. Before starting a business, an entrepreneur must know who their target audience is in order to know who to market to. Today, digital marketing is huge, and the best free digital marketing is social media. Use it to your advantage. You have to know your audience and engage your audience with content that not only appeals to them but drives them to buy. Build relationships with your customers to create trust and repeat buyers. Hire strategically. Your team has to add value to your company. Lastly, cut unnecessary expenses that are not contributing to the growth of your business. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
