The mixing bowl sat on her kitchen counter, not for cookies, but for survival.
De'Vonna Pittman was losing her hair. The stress had started showing up in patches, and every product she tried made it worse. So she did what nobody told her to do — she started mixing her own.
That was nine years ago.
Last month, De'Vonna cut a ribbon in the Minneapolis skyway system, opening the doors to the Curls & Culture Lounge. The space sits where thousands of downtown workers pass every day, a boutique that smells like shea and possibility. Her products line the shelves. Her name is on the door.
But here's what the ribbon-cutting photos don't show you: the years between the kitchen counter and the skyway storefront. The nights she stayed up researching formulations. The rejection emails. The moment she realized the thing she made to fix her own problem might fix someone else's too.
De'Vonna's brand, Naturalicious, now sits on shelves at Macy's and Walmart. National distribution. The kind of placement that makes people assume you had investors and an MBA and a business plan laminated in a binder somewhere.
She had a mixing bowl.
What strikes me most about De'Vonna isn't the retail success, though that matters. It's what she's doing with the process that got her here. She created a program that teaches Black girls to become entrepreneurs by making their own products — the exact same journey she took. They learn formulation. They learn business. They learn that the thing bothering them might be the thing that builds them.
She's not just selling hair products. She's handing girls the mixing bowl.
The Curls & Culture Lounge is more than a store. De'Vonna designed it as a gathering space, a place where natural hair isn't a problem to be solved but a culture to be celebrated. She wanted somewhere that felt like belonging, right in the middle of downtown, right where everyone could see it.
Nine years ago, she was standing in her kitchen with patches on her scalp and no answers on the shelf. She made her own answer. Then she made it again, and again, until it was a business, then a brand, then a movement.
The skyway location matters. It's not tucked away in a strip mall. It's not hidden. It's in the flow of the city, visible, present, claiming space. De'Vonna built something that couldn't be ignored, and then she put it somewhere nobody could miss it.
She didn't start with a storefront or a distribution deal. She started with a crisis and a willingness to try something nobody asked her to try.
The mixing bowl was never about cookies. *It was about building what didn't exist yet.*
