The first batch happened at a kitchen counter in Minneapolis, in a bowl she probably also used for pancakes.
De'Vonna Pittman wasn't trying to start a company. She was trying to find something — anything — that worked on her own hair and her daughter's hair, something that didn't come with a warning label of ingredients she couldn't pronounce. She looked. She didn't find it. So she made it herself.
That's the whole beginning, really. A woman standing in her own kitchen, mixing something because nobody else had bothered to.
Before any of this, De'Vonna spent twenty years working for Hennepin County government. Two decades of public service. That's not a résumé line you walk away from lightly — it's a pension, a title, a steady thing your family can count on. Most people spend a career learning to protect exactly that kind of security. She spent hers building it, and then she bet it on herself.
The beauty industry was not built with her in mind. That isn't bitterness — it's just arithmetic. For a long time, the shelves in the big stores didn't carry much for women who looked like her, and the products that did exist often loaded up on the very things she was trying to avoid. So the market that ignored her became the market she understood better than anyone. She knew what was missing because she'd stood in the aisle needing it.
She named the line Nature's Syrup. Clean ingredients, hair and skin, made for the customer the shelves had overlooked.
Then the shelves came looking for her.
Walmart. Macy's. Hy-Vee. The same kind of retail giants whose aisles once had nothing for her now stock the products she formulated in that kitchen. If you want to know what persistence looks like from the outside, that's it — a bowl on a counter turning into national distribution, one buyer meeting at a time.
But the part that tells you who De'Vonna actually is came in July of 2026.
She opened a physical space in downtown Minneapolis. Not just a store — a retail shop and a community lounge, a room where people could come in, sit down, be seen, belong. The mayor of Minneapolis showed up for the ribbon-cutting. There were scissors and a crowd and a whole city paying attention to a woman who twenty years earlier was clocking in at the county.
Here's what I keep coming back to. A lot of people would have been content to sell online, to let Walmart move the boxes and cash the checks. De'Vonna wanted a door. She wanted a threshold you could cross and a chair you could settle into.
She didn't just launch a brand. She built the store she always wanted to walk into — *and then she unlocked it for everyone else.*
That's the thing about a public servant who bets on herself. She never stops serving the public. She just does it on her own terms now, in a room she made with her own hands.
And downtown Minneapolis has a new front door because of it.
