Black-owned businesses | Culture & Community | Dixwell | NXTHVN | Arts & Culture | Arts & Anti-racism
The "Boss Up" Panelists. From left to right: Onyeka Obiocha, Renee Loren, Petah “Jay” Johnson, Leonard Brown, Mercy Quaye and Joshua Jenkins. Lucy Gellman Photos.
Keep asking questions. Find your community. Stop worrying so much about the resume. Discover the position that gets you out of bed in the morning—and then land it.
Give in to fear. Because on the other side, there might be something beautiful.
That advice came out of New Haven’s inaugural Sweets & Sounds Con Saturday, as over 200 young artists and entrepreneurs filled NXTHVN at 169 Henry St. for a full day of panels, workshops, networking sessions and multimedia art installations meant to share knowledge among Connecticut creatives.
The brainchild of Sweets & Sounds Entertainment Founder Angel Dahfay, the nine-hour event marked a homecoming for the brand, which started in New Haven just over four years ago. For her, it’s part of a vision in which artists—particularly Black artists and non-Black artists of color—are able to trade knowledge in an environment that is collaborative rather than competitive.
“It feels amazing. I think for me, I'm a huge advocate of giving people their flowers while they're here,” Dahfay said Saturday, as she buzzed between workshops on web design, fiscal sponsorship, and marketing. “I see the hard work that the panelists are doing, the moderators, the installations, volunteers that came out to help me—I want to be able to give them their flowers and have them and give them a platform to be able to speak about their experience.”
From the first DJ set of the day to a final afterparty at Jazzy’s Cabaret, it was very much a labor of love. Inside the Henry Street space, which has become an incubator for contemporary artists, installations bloomed across the atrium, humming to life in brilliant color as DJs Selector AR and Kasey Cortez kicked off the first sets of the day. As attendees trickled in, some rocking their own brands, the low hum of conversation rose to a wave. An energy crackled through the air.
Angel Dahfay: "I'm a huge advocate of giving people their flowers while they're here."
Nowhere, perhaps, was that more evident than in the day’s panels, as speakers shared their own paths to entrepreneurship. During the first, titled “Boss Up,” creatives Joshua Jenkins, Leonard Brown, Petah “Jay” Johnson, Mercy Quaye, Renee Loren and Onyeka Obiocha took center stage, pulling no punches as they described how they made the leap to working for themselves.
All occupy a creative space: Jenkins is a founding member of Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner and The Caf by Cafeteria, Brown is a personal trainer, Loren is the owner of Trachouse Beauty Lounge, Quaye is the executive director and founder of The Narrative Project, Jay is a New York-based designer behind Project 96, and Obiocha, who also moderated, is the executive director of CT Next. Brianna Régine, who runs her own consulting firm, joined for a question and answer session afterwards.
From their first comments to a question-and-answer session 90 minutes later, panelists encouraged attendees to both take their time working toward their own goals—and to lean into the fear that will inevitably follow pursuing something new. As they spoke, artwork peeked out on the exposed brick wall behind them, as if it was saying hello.
Quaye, who began dreaming of The Narrative Project in 2015 and launched it formally in 2019, pointed to the time it takes to turn an idea into a project, and a project into a business. In 2017, she was still working for Educators for Excellence when she began taking on clients after her first work day was over. For months, she managed communications consulting work with a full-time job, hopping from Educators for Excellence to Yale University.
Then at the end of one work day, she would start her next one.
"I don't know that I've ever been more exhausted,” she remembered. She felt like she was freelancing all the time. It was only after her tax forms came in in 2019 that she realized she could be making more as a full-time communications consultant than in a communications job at Yale.
Four years later, The Narrative Project now employs 25 people and has a portfolio of partner organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, ConnCAT and ConnCORP, and Planned Parenthood of Southern New England.
A lifelong fan of Star Trek, Quaye called building a startup as a journey into the great beyond—with a little more financial precarity than Captain Kirk may have faced during his intergalactic travels. She added that some of her most sound career advice comes from her five-year-old nephew, who recently told her that “beautiful is on the other side of fear.”
“If it's up against your comfort zone, that's the next place you need to be,” she said. “If it's making you a little bit afraid, that's the next thing you need to do. Because every single time you come up against that comfort zone, if you stay in that zone, you never grow.”
Brown, who now works full-time as a personal trainer, added that there’s also no right or wrong time to leave the comfort of a full-time job. There were three years between the time he began taking clients as a personal trainer and the day he quit his full-time job in late 2019.
During those three years, he remembered, he would wake up around 5 a.m., be out the door by 5:30 or 6 a.m., train with people before work, then work a full day job and go back to the gym when it ended. When he finally did leave his job, a global pandemic forced him to make the online pivot. It has taught him that trying to fast forward doesn’t make a business any stronger.
“There's no rush. Don't feel rushed,” he said. “It’s not about feeling like you have to be the first to do something. It's going to take you time, and it's scary as hell.”
“That Bad Day”
Speakers were also not shy in describing the days—and there have been many—where not everything has gone according to plan. Among their “aight” moments and small business revelations, each of them paused to remember a time when they found themselves suddenly on unsteady footing, and not certain what their next step would be.
“Tell me about that bad day,” Obiocha said. “Have you experienced that? And how did you all get through that?”
Even before he was finished with the question, it appeared that panelists were eager to talk openly about their losses—and the lessons they learned from each one. Loren, who began styling hair in her bedroom in 2007 and opened her first salon several years ago, remembered getting a call in December 2021 that her lease was ending, and she would have to leave the space.
At the time, Trachouse was still at 900 Grand Ave. in New Haven, and she couldn’t imagine having to look for an entirely new storefront. She knew that moving didn’t just mean a new space—it could also entail new furniture, styling equipment, and accessories. She also knew that she had multiple employees who depended on her for a paycheck. Her whole hope in starting Trachouse had been “a sisterhood,” she said—and now the sisterhood stood on slippery footing.
It was ultimately her faith that got her through, she said. Along the way, losing one space taught her how to more efficiently work with banks, establish a line of credit, and learn what she needed in a brick-and-mortar storefront. It now has two locations, at 39 Frontage Rd. in East Haven and 534 State St. in New Haven.
“It was a very lonely time, trying to find a new space that was better than what I had,” she remembered. And yet, she kept moving forward because it was the only way Trachouse would survive. "I never thought we would be where we are today."
She encouraged attendees to have faith in their own ideas and in a higher power—because sometimes, the people around them may be skeptical. It took her years of running a brick-and-mortar salon to feel comfortable stepping away from a full-time job that helped her build it, which she did in January of this year. No sooner had she quit than three of her salon employees moved on, and she had to scramble to make sure customers’ needs were being met.
"People in your life will try to convince you that your business, or what you're doing, is a hobby and it's not real,” she said. "It's not gonna feel safe. It's not gonna feel good. It's gonna feel very scary. But only uncomfortability brings you to the next level.”
Jay, who has grown Project 96 into a sartorial celebration of Black joy and of New York City, paused before he got into his bad day. He took the audience back to late 2019, when the world stood unknowingly on the lip of the Covid-19 pandemic. That year, Project 96 had successfully embarked on his first collaboration with Nike. It was the kind of project, he told attendees Saturday, that he expected to be life-changing.
In 2020, he had just started talking with the corporation when the first whisperings of the Covid-19 pandemic began. Within weeks, Nike pulled the project. A flight he had out to the company’s Oregon headquarters disappeared. What had started as a year of collaboration turned within weeks into a year of quarantine and intense isolation. He turned to his community of friends, he said, and learned to take the forced rest as an unexpected gift.
“There's also beauty in being still,” he said. “As creatives, we're told to like, never take your foot off the gas. And in some way, just the three months, four months that I was sitting and dwelling in that, helped me realize that rest is also a creative superpower … I think that experience really helped me refine my vision.”
An installation from The Caf.
Jenkins, who is the co-founder of Breakfast Lunch & Dinner and now runs a brick-and-mortar outlet of The Caf in Hartford, told attendees he had a similar experience to Loren. Around 2017, he and fellow partners on Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner had a pop-up called Marquee, which operated out of a vintage store in the West End of Hartford. Offered half of the space, Jenkins and fellow entrepreneurs invested time and resources into their pop-up. It was part of his small business dream, realized.
”I always wanted a place that carried the products that I liked, had the same approach to self-expression that I was into,” he said. “And I think the opportunity of creating that In the city of Hartford was [a dream].”
Except, it was a temporary one. Two weeks after the launch, the creative team behind Marquee got a notice to vacate the premises. At the time, Jenkins said, he was crushed. But since, he’s learned the importance of having a contract in which every “t” is crossed, every “i” dotted.
Some losses aren’t business-related, Brown said, clearing his throat as he spoke methodically. While he acknowledged the logistical hurdles he has faced as a personal trainer—early mornings, late nights, and a pivot to Zoom and Instagram live during Covid-19—the most devastating blow to his career came when he lost his mother, Patricia Webb, in August 2021.
From the moment he had begun training, she had been by his side. When she passed, his whole world came crashing down. In the front row, his dad watched quietly, cheering him on with no words at all. Brown explained that he took his pain and turned it into power in the gym and with his clients. There’s not a day he doesn’t think about Webb, who lives on in her son.
"There’s nothing you can't work your way through,” he said. “People see me now and they think, ‘You got it together.’ And my story never went like that."
“Putting Ourselves Out There”
Top: Members of the Dope N' Delicious team serve up food. Bottom: An installation from the Westville-based small business BLOOM. "It feels so good to be surrounded by creatives," said BLOOM owner Alisha Crutchfield.
As attendees from across the state wove through the room, many noted how excited they were to be there, and how much they felt like they were learning. Making her way towards a DJ set at the far side of the atrium, Black Haven Founder and Executive Director Salwa Abdussabur praised Dahfay for bringing the event to New Haven after earlier iterations in Hartford.
As a lifelong New Havener, she’s seen firsthand the importance of affinity spaces, particularly those focused on creatives who have historically been pushed to the margins.
“When we allow Black and Brown young leaders to lead, the community comes out,” she said.
As they served up mac and cheese, wings, corn, broccoli, rice and chicken from Dope N’ Delicious on Dixwell Avenue, Kiwa Bolden and Deari’e Allick both said they were glad to have the chance to spread the word about their small business in a crowd of entrepreneurs who knew the hustle of owning and sustaining a brick-and-mortar.
“It feels really good,” said Bolden. “We’re really right around the corner, and it feels good letting people taste our food. We’re putting ourselves out there.”
Angela and Jaylen Brown.
In a botanical-inspired installation from the Westville-based small business BLOOM next door, mom and son Angela and Jaylen Brown said they had made the trek from Bridgeport to see Leonard Brown speak. As Brown’s “bonus mom,” Angela said she was incredibly proud and inspired following the panel.
Around her, flowers burst into bright color. A palm front spread its wide fingers across a panel behind her. Alisha Crutchfield, who owns BLOOM, later called it an honor "to be surrounded by creatives."
Jaylen, who is a music producer, said it was refreshing to be in a space that celebrated not only creatives, but specifically Black creatives and other creatives of color. As they chatted, the two scoped out a floral installation from BLOOM, sipping two matching, garnet-colored spring mocktails before they headed back into the atrium.
“It’s amazing,” he said.