When attendees at a natural hair show first walked past the Be Rooted booth, they did double takes. In the middle of an expo hall filled with curls and haircare, there was a wall of bold, colorful journals, planners and pens. What was a stationery brand doing at a natural hair show, an event that celebrates and educates around wearing hair in its natural texture?

For Jasmin Foster, CEO of Be Rooted, the answer was obvious. If she wanted to build a thriving Black-owned stationery brand, she needed to be wherever Black women gather to feel seen, inspired and celebrated, even if that meant standing out.

So instead of waiting for shoppers to stumble across her online, Foster made it a strategy to show up in real life, at events where people come specifically to discover new products and support brands that speak to them. She deliberately seeks out spaces where her target customers are already in the room, and then meets them there, face to face. 

“I knew that the audience of natural hair shows was 98% Black women and there were going to be no other stationery brands like us there,” Foster tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “Some people might say that’s a little strange, but for me it was a space to not compete with anybody else, connect with 100% of the audience and get people excited about our brand.”

When Foster launched Be Rooted in 2020, she was simply trying to create the stationery she wished she could find on store shelves. Today, her brand is sold at Target, Walmart, Amazon and other major retailers, and has grown into a multi-seven-figure dollar business without outside investors. Be Rooted had “consistent monthly revenue from the beginning,” Foster says. 

The brand is an intentionally designed stationery and gifting company aimed at empowering Black and brown women through affirming messaging and imagery. Foster noticed that while her childhood home was filled with Black art, mass retailers rarely reflected that aesthetic. She wanted to bring that artwork and culture into everyday goods like journals, planners and mugs. 

“I was always that young girl who loved my journal,” Foster tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “I use journaling as a way to help me understand my goals and to just get my thoughts out. I wanted to create a brand that gave our customers a place to come home to, that they felt seen, that they felt like they belonged here.”

Foster, who grew up in Indianapolis and built her career as a retail buyer for companies like Target and Amazon, started Be Rooted in 2020 while still working full-time as head of sales at skincare brand Urban Skin Rx. She ran Be Rooted as a side hustle for two years, leaning on her parents’ home for storage and shipping, before going full-time in 2022. 

Foster intentionally crafted the brand to reflect her customer base. The illustrations in Be Rooted products depict a range of skin tones and hair types. 

Getting started with $4,000

The brand’s first batch of costs was about $4,000, which went towards inventory, branding and website design. Foster funneled every dollar earned back into the business to make it better than it was before. Some of these reinvestments included securing better photography, finding elevated factories that could produce more sustainable products and hiring a web developer to build out the website. 

With limited cash, Foster relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing to get Be Rooted off the ground. For example, she designed a single graphic and sent it to hundreds of her own personal contacts, asking them to post the graphic at the same time on a certain date to announce the product launch. 

“So when we launched, it felt like it was bigger than it was,” Foster says. “But it was really that I had used every single contact in my entire network to help me get the word out.”

She also leaned into creative collaborations with other emerging brands, offering to give samples that they could place in orders, cross-promote in email newsletters and host mutual giveaways. These scrappy tactics let Be Rooted tap into other audiences for free and built a foundation of community-driven awareness that paid off as retail opportunities emerged. 

Debuting in Target nine months after launch

Although Foster always envisioned retail, she initially saw it as a long-term goal because of its cost and complexity. However, within months of launching, retailers came knocking. Be Rooted selected Target as its first major partner, debuting in March 2021 — just nine months after launch. 

Foster expanded carefully to avoid outgrowing the company’s cash flow and inventory capacity. After Target, Be Rooted added TJ Maxx in 2022, Barnes & Noble bookstores in 2023, Kohl’s in 2024 and Walmart in 2025, while also building a presence in hundreds of independent bookstores, museum shops, airports and hospital gift shops.

“From a retail standpoint, we’ve had the opportunity to be in some of the biggest ones,” Foster says. 

While planners and journals were the starting point, Be Rooted quickly evolved into a broader lifestyle brand. The company now offers puzzles, coffee mugs, note cards, gift sets, seasonal products and is expanding into wearable tech like cell phone and laptop bags, all tied together by its distinctive artwork.

Foster’s long-term vision is to have a Be Rooted home collection complete with pillows, throw blankets and expanded drinkware that mirror the same art on the company’s stationery. 

Be Rooted’s growth principles

Several core principles powered Be Rooted’s growth from a home-based startup to a multi-seven-figure brand across major retailers. For one, the company became retail-ready earlier than expected because Foster repeatedly reinvested profits to level up the brand’s look and feel. “Every single time we earn something, we put it right back into the business,” Foster says. 

She was also unafraid to ask for help. The company is bootstrapped, with no outside investors. Instead, Foster relies on a bank line of credit to support inventory and retailer growth. At one point, Foster asked a mentor for guidance on how to scale. Once she did, the mentor connected her with a banking partner who helped her secure financing and understand how to present her numbers to banks through a pitch deck. 

“From that opportunity, one of those banks is still the bank I do business with now,” Foster says. “If I never asked for that advice, I probably would have never had the relationship that I have with my bank now.”

Advice for founders

Foster emphasized that a balanced mindset was a non-negotiable growth lever. She encouraged founders to build a “self-care toolkit” and to practice self-care before things get hard. Her own toolkit includes drawing, floral arranging and going for runs. 

“When it comes to running a business, you’re going to have very good days and you’re going to have some days that really suck,” Foster says. “The biggest piece of advice I would say is to build out your self-care toolkit so that before you get into the fire, you already have the tools to help you manage your stress.”

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