Three extraordinary stories from three entrepreneurs who have harnessed their ingenuity and resourcefulness—and a grant from Synchrony via LISC—to keep their businesses going and growing through the economic fallout of the pandemic.
Lovely’s Boutique & Beauty Supply
Owner: Nasshon Thompson
Bridgeport, CT
The year 2019 was a good one for Nasshon “Lovely” Thompson, a culmination, really, of the Jamaican immigrant’s 20-year journey in America. The business that reflects her truest passion, Lovely’s Boutique & Beauty Supply, was thriving at its location on Main Street in Bridgeport, CT. A woman could walk in, bask a while in Lovely’s friendly service, and walk out feeling fabulous, with a statement-making look worthy of the red carpet—and at a very affordable price.
The year 2020? Well, it’s brought the kind of challenges no one could have anticipated. Covid-19 shut Lovely’s doors for quite a while, but even after it reopened, business remained anemic (under distancing guidelines the store has room for five customers at any one time). People still weren’t going to proms, parties, weddings, or music shows. Thompson even noticed that some of her customers seemed changed, stressed. “It has affected my community a great deal,” she says. “There’s nowhere to go, and we’re not getting dressed. It’s only the nurses and the CNAs that go out, and they wear scrubs.”
Thompson’s instinct for business and for fashion goes back to her childhood in St. Catherine, Jamaica, when she helped her mother by sewing in her clothing factory. She immigrated to Queens, NY, in 2000, later bringing her two oldest children to the States, attaining legal immigration status, and having a third child, now 13, in Queens. She started Lovely’s there, and also earned a licensed practical nurse (LPN) degree and worked in various health care jobs.
After a divorce, Thompson moved the family to Bridgeport, reestablishing the shop there in 2017. She started with just handbags, hair extensions and wigs, makeup, jewelry, and other accessories, but soon decided to add a full fashion line, so a customer could get a complete outfit for any special occasion. After moving into a new, larger space just down the block in 2018, the business took off. Thompson was prospering.
As the pandemic grinds on, she’s had to resort to some of the “odd jobs” she took on when she first moved to Queens, now using her nursing experience to assist people in getting to appointments or taking medication. Much of the shop inventory she acquired for spring and summer, she knows, cannot be sold next year to trend-conscious customers. She’s had to add security bars since a neighboring business got broken into.
Still Thompson is very optimistic that a $10,000 grant from Synchrony through LISC will help her cover rent, lights, and insurance—a bridge to the day when business picks up on the strength of women with places to go and statements to make. As a new sign she’d ordered was being installed on her storefront, Thompson worried about paying the balance due on it—until she realized the grant money was hitting her account that very day. “I thought, thank God for that.”
Quality Comprehensive Health Center
Owner: Lisa Wigfall
Charlotte, NC
The Covid-19 pandemic has made us all more aware of the debt we owe to essential workers. Quality Comprehensive Health Center is what you might call an essential organization. For residents of Charlotte, NC, it meets basic needs in good times and bad.
The center is rooted in Charlotte’s West End, a concentration of historic African-American communities that today experience many of the conditions that lead to poorer health outcomes, from the stress of poverty to pollution from highways and industrial facilities.
From its four locations “Quality” provides primary care, mental health counseling, substance abuse treatment, testing for HIV and STDs, and in-home care for the elderly. It offers these services along with case management to people who are homeless, welcomes the uninsured, and helps community members manage chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, all “in the spirit of the Good Samaritan,” says CFO Priscilla Cunningham. “If you are broke and you don’t have a penny to your name, we will provide you with quality, comprehensive health care,” she says. “We help every person that comes through our doors.”
Quality was launched sixteen years ago by owner and CEO Lisa Wigfall. She’d worked for almost two decades as a medical social worker and knew that some groups—women living with HIV, for example—were severely underserved. “I discovered healthy adults would and could raise healthy children, so my mission initially was to serve women and children, and to place a particular emphasis on single women,” says Wigfall.
Over the years the center expanded its offerings to address community needs, and today is raising funds to renovate a vacant building where it will consolidate services into a one-stop-shop, making it easier for people to keep appointments and get multiple services without missing work or running from place to place. Many patients don’t have a car, or the cash for an Uber ride.
Amid the economic and public health crisis of Covid-19, demand for Quality’s care has spiked. Stress on its 40 employees has also increased as they work to meet the demand while also donning protective gear and reaching more clients via socially distanced telehealth. As the Covid crisis deepened in March, Wigfall told a West End blogger, “We take all commercial insurances, Medicaid, and Medicare. And we are here to help. Even if people just want to call and ask questions and things of that nature, we are here. It is just about having conversations to keep people safe.”
Being there, of course, means making ends meet as a non-profit organization, even in the face of new challenges. A $10,000 grant from Synchrony through LISC is helping to fill that gap. “There are days when people are really concerned from a budgeting standpoint,” says Cunningham. “But fortunately we’ve been able to get by. This grant assistance will really help us move the organization forward.”
MicroNikko PMU Studio & Beauty Bar
Owner: Janell “Nikki” Walker
Charlotte, NC
After graduating from cosmetology school in 2007, Janell Walker lost interest in the beauty profession. Then she discovered that beauty care can be a healing art, and her calling was born.
The catalyst was a diagnosis, several years ago, of stage 3 breast cancer. Walker, known by her nickname Nikki, underwent numerous surgeries, radiation, and chemo. That same summer her beloved teenage son Johnny was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and also had to endure a grueling round of treatments.
Fighting for her life and that of her child, Walker felt like the last thing she should be thinking about was her appearance. But she’d always been lucky that way, with luxuriant natural hair and a glowing complexion. The loss of her hair, eyebrows, and lashes, along with her healthy skin tone, was painful. “It was very difficult for me to find beauty in myself,” she recalls.
She started experimenting with different skin-care products, make-ups, false lashes. She learned about micro-blading, in which a cosmetologist uses a hand tool to delicately “draw” in new eyebrow hairs, a semi-permanent tattoo. She even found a cosmetologist to treat Johnny. “We got him new eyebrows, and that was a game-changer for him,” she says.
Fast-forward to autumn 2019. Walker and her son are both survivors, and Walker, armed with a variety of new trainings and certifications, opens MicroNikko PMU Studio & Beauty Bar in Charlotte. Her vision: to offer microblading and other permanent makeup services, eyelash treatments and products, waxing, facials and more in an atmosphere of deluxe pampering. Her marketing includes reaching out to local doctors and cancer treatment centers. She built it, and the clients came, a racially diverse bunch including glamorous social media afficionados and working women looking for a beauty boost.
Then the pandemic hit and MicroNikko was forced to close for all of March, April, and May. “After I put everything emotionally, financially, and physically into this business, it was devastating,” she says. By late August revenues were still way down, as Walker slowly added back services and put in place precautions, intent on her own safety as a cancer survivor and that of her clients.
During all this time, Walker was still on the hook for the shop’s rent, utilities, and an inventory of products, some of which had expired. Still she’s determined to build back even stronger.
Walker intends to use her $10,000 grant from Synchrony through LISC to cover the aforementioned expenses, and also to allow her two aestheticians to work in the shop without paying suite fees until everybody gets back on their feet. “I want to say, ‘Just come in and make some money so that you can live,’” says Walker. In October two hair stylists are coming on board. Walker has plans to offer nail care, too, and she’s getting additional training in a complex technique to tattoo nipples for those who have lost them to surgery.
In the meantime, she’s calling on the personal grit and gratitude that helped her get through cancer. Says Walker, “I learned that the things that we feel like we’re supposed to have in life, they’re not given. They’re blessings.”