Kim Roxie - 1st Place Winner
Kim Roxie isn't new to the game. She's the Founder & CEO of LAMIK Beauty, a clean beauty brand that keeps multicultural women top of mind. At 21, Kim opened a brick and mortar makeup shop in Houston, TX with faith and a $500 investment from her mother. She ran that store for 14 years and was the youngest African-American woman to have her products carried in a major department store, Macy's.
Kim pivoted her business in 2018 and launched LAMIK 2.0, an E-commerce beauty tech-enabled company, in 2019. Roxie secured a partnership with an Augmented Reality company to launch a virtual makeup try on lamikbeauty.com. LAMIK has been featured in Essence, Allure, Cosmopolitan, and Martha Stewart.com
Gianne Doherty - 2nd Place Winner
Gianne Doherty is a founder, speaker, and clean beauty and wellness advocate. She founded Organic Bath Co., to bring clean and healthy skin care products to the market and WELL Summit to bring more education, awareness, and inclusivity to the health and wellness conversation.
Her wellness journey started through her experience with Organic Bath Co., where she found out how unregulated the personal care industry is. Through working on Organic Bath Co., she also found she was answering questions about the wellness movement as a whole. She saw the need for a wellness-focused destination that focused on community, education, and empowerment and founded WELL Summit in 2015.
It has since grown to three events with over 2,000 attendees a year. Recently, she has been focused on promoting clean beauty on a national level and has spoken at SXSW, Create & Cultivate, BlogHer, ALT Summit, and of course, WELL Summit.
Takia Ross - 3rd Place Winner
Takia Ross is a makeup artist and the Owner of Accessmatized Make-Up Artistry, home of Pretty Mobile Baltimore, and the creator of KiKi Thunda Cosmetics. Named after her alter ego, KiKi Thunda Cosmetics specializes in lip products. Takia has been named one of Baltimore's Top 25 Women to Watch, one of DMV's Top 100 Minority Business Enterprises, and one of Baltimore's Top Community Builders. Takia has also been featured in Forbes, the Baltimore Business Journal, the Baltimore Sun, the Baltimore Times, the Daily Record, and many other notable publications for her commitment to empowering and advocating for Black Women in business.
Accessmatized provides exceptional customer service, beautifully makeup artistry while also creating high-quality cosmetics. Takia's beauty line ensures that women wear them to feel their most confident selves. Her makeup artistry and cosmetics have been featured on BET and NBC, as well as Essence Magazine.
KiKi Thunda Cosmetics is a highly pigmented, long-lasting, water-resistant, and smudge-proof liquid lipstick. With over 21 shades and counting, beautiful women everywhere have a variety of shades to choose from. They can walk into any room with the confidence that their lipsticks will stay on all day, with powerful lip colors that make a statement without saying a word.
BGV thanks partnerships such as this that help our founders break down barriers and make history. We continue to thank the sponsors, the judges, the supporters, and various members of our community for supporting these women in their pitch competition. Together we will continue to create access to capital and education for our Black and Brown founders to continue to grow and sustain their businesses.
Subscribe to the Digital Orange Juice for juicy ideas and the people who fund them. You can find out about our next pitch competitions here. Don't forget to check out the SheRaise platform for more pitch events.
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