You've Been Code-Switching Your Whole Life — What If You Stopped?

Your hair is different in every climate. Your voice is different in every room. You've gotten good at switching, but you've never gotten comfortable with it.

Orion Brown, founder of Black Travel Box, created her brand because the beauty industry had a simple answer for travelers like her: figure it out yourself. But building the brand meant rejection from manufacturers, facing implicit bias every time she walked into a pitch, and fighting for limited funding.

This episode explores what it looks like to stop performing long enough to ask what it's been costing you.

Topics discussed:

00:00 - Introduction

02:00 - Black Travel Box

03:49 - Where the global beauty industry is lacking

05:54 - The Starter Kit + product line

09:47 - Why she had to formulate the products herself

14:58 - From pre-med to brand manager

22:16 - Losing authenticity in corporate environments

23:53 - The Unmasking Audit