Ms. Rachel Gave This Black-Owned Bakery a Shout-Out. Its Next 24 Hours Covered a Month’s Rent
A social media boost gave two Black-owned businesses more than sales. It changed how their founders plan to grow.
Ms. Rachel and Bomme Sweets founder Ashley La Bomme-Benson. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock, Bomme Sweets
In early August, Ashley La Bomme-Benson was taking a bath and scrolling her Threads feed. She came across an August 11 post from educator and children’s advocate Rachel Accurso (aka, Ms. Rachel) asking Black entrepreneurs to share their business with her and her community in the replies. La Bomme-Benson—a baker and owner of the Los Angeles-based cookie company The Bomme Sweets—nearly scrolled past it.
In the following weeks, Ms
In the following weeks, Ms. Rachel made five individual posts of Black-owned businesses on Threads in-between posts calling attention to topics related to race and current injustices in America and amplifying works from Black authors, journalists, and content creators. On August 23, Ms Rachel announced that she would continue highlighting Black-owned businesses with “a lot of cool things planned.”
When Ms. Rachel’s post already had 4K+ replies, La Bomme-Benson thought, what are the odds that she would notice her?
La Bomme-Benson left a comment introducing herself and her nine-year-old business and shared pictures of her company’s cookies. She also liked as many comments as she could from other Black-owned businesses. With more than 155k followers on TikTok and 68k followers on Facebook—where she documents her baking process—she recognizes the power of social media. Still, La Bomme-Benson says she never quite cracked the code on Instagram and Threads.
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The next morning she made a post
The next morning she made a post that read: “ Ms. Rachel posted about Black-owned businesses sharing their business in the comments, and I’ve never so much as had 10 views on Threads, and today I woke up to 60. Thank you Ms. Rachel for standing up for us.”
An hour after expressing her appreciation, Ms. Rachel reposted her comment and followed her account, something La Bomme-Benson didn’t notice at first. Then came the bigger shift. “ I got an alert from Shopify that I had a cookie order,” says La Bomme-Benson. “I [hadn’t] had a cookie order in over a year.”
While this year she produced custom orders—comprising a mix of items like Rice Krispy treats and fruit for birthday parties—totaling $7,000, La Bomme-Benson says that a tough economy has taken toll on her bakery business, which she refers to as a “luxury” and not a “necessity.”
Source: www.inc.com
