YouSaid · the spoken record

Sharon Chuter

lines on the record: 23
first: 2020-07-09
most recent: 2020-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I hope in five years' time that we are seeing real change, right? I hope in five years' time it's gonna be, yes, we all came together as a community because the irony of this, this is actually a unification moment. It's time for us to unite and it's time for us to unite against one common enemy.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All they're saying is another black person complaining, another black person saying the word black, which is super toxic, and missing the whole damn point.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, what's been really interesting and proves my point about unconscious bias, right? When we went out with this company, we had a lot of white America who just felt really attacked. They felt like, oh, so are you telling companies now that white people shouldn't have job? I'm like, this is a problem that we have. It almost seems like you kind of have a pro-Black conversation without people feeling like it's an anti-white conversation. I'm having a pro-Black conversation. I'm talking about a human rights issue. And your response to it is, oh, my job is now at risk. But no, your job is not at risk. Like it's mind-boggling. People don't understand. It's like, oh, Ben, you're talking about race. You're dividing people. We are divided. We are divided. People are getting killed on the street. That's the country we live in. And you're telling me that me saying, hey, stop not hiring us because we're black is me dividing the country. I'm now the bad person. And that just shows you the level of unconscious bias that the people who are publicly commenting about this kind of even see there's anything wrong with what they're saying. They're so uncomfortable with it.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the only way to break anything you do in your unconscious is by consciously counteracting it. And that's why we need this to be talked about.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This don't take somebody who has a full time job just because they're black and tell them come and fix my diversity issue whilst doing your full time job. That's not fair. And that's what these companies have done because what they're seeing is that the entire ecosystem is broken. The HR manuals have to be rewritten. Companies still have HR manuals that discriminate against black hair because all black hair stars are considered unprofessional. I got told to my face by my MD when I was in my corporate life that I couldn't wear braids to work. It was unprofessional. It looked ghetto and that I had too much potential to be presenting myself like that. So I went 14 years where I could not wear braids. I live in Beverly Hills. People see me walking my dog and they walk up to me like, oh, you're the dog walker. Who's the owner of this dog? You know, so one of these things in isolation is not a big deal. But when this is your reality every day, come on, like give us a break. And this is what we call unconscious bias. It's just things that people just do instinctively without thinking about it. And that's why we have to have this conversation.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm not because this time we're taking it into our own hands. You know, that's why I started this movement. We're not going to just sit and wait and see. I'm a dreamer. I'm a crazy one. You know what I mean? Like if I thought this was all a waste and this was just PR for the sake of PR, I'll be running my business and making money, right? I would not be, you know, spending my whole time doing this, right? So I think for me, it's like, I do believe that we can effect change. I do believe that the consumers have the power. I believe that if they keep up on this, companies will change within three years. We'll be having a different conversation. It will change, right? So I see a pathway to change because right now I'm seeing what's happening behind the scenes. This companies are in shambles right now. They're running around like head as chickens because they have no answers. You know, most of the leadership teams are not diverse. So all of a sudden they're now looking to their employees who they haven't even promoted to management level saying, come and fix it, you know, come and fix it. And this is what they've been doing pulling these employees into new diversity teams. And this has also been a frustration of me as well. And I've spoken about it.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enormous amount of money, ridiculous, some people say to law enforcement, right? So you take people, you don't give them opportunity to participate in the economy, companies are not giving you jobs. When you go and set up a business, 0.0006% of funding dollars goes to black women. Yet black women are the fastest group of entrepreneurs in this country. They said of businesses faster than any racial group in this country, yet there is no funding. So it's starving out. If you look at all the black successful brands right now, most of them bootstrapped. It was, I started with $5,000. I started with $2,000. Meanwhile, the average white male gets 2.2 million dollars to set up a business. The average amount of money given to a black woman is $42,000. That is marginalization.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's worth it. It's completely worth it. This is a human rights issue. Everybody sympathized by St. George Floyd, right? And see somebody snuck the life out of him with their hand casualties in their pocket. Everybody sees that part and everybody's talking about police brutality. What I'm talking about here is the cause. You know, police brutality is the effect. This is the cause. The cause is marginalization. So why has this country done since the emancipation declaration? They have put enormous amount of money into law enforcement.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, oh, yes, you know, Nike dropped the commercial within 48 hours. Don't do it. Everybody was applauding. It became a competition for who can donate the most. I'm going to give 100,000 to NAACP. I'm going to give a million dollars. At no point in time did they think about what role have they played in marginalizing people. So the same companies that you go through their social feed and you cannot see a blackface, they do not have black employees. They do not have black executives. And they're the same people telling their followers that you have to do something. You cannot stay silent. So I thought this was a really good opportunity because they came out and spoke, right? Okay, you're speaking your money where your mouth is and actually effects change. Your companies are racist. Your companies are riddled with unconscious bias. Your companies have”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that it came out of frustration. I was extremely frustrated because, like I said, even the reason I set up my brand was for the same reason, companies have been inclusive, companies not hiring black people. Right now in America, the black adult population is just over 13%. The black participation in corporate America is 8%. In leadership roles, it goes to 3.2%. There are 615 billionaires in the country, only six of them are black. Every single level you look at, there is this economic isolation of black people, which is creating an economic inequality, right? And that gap keeps going wider and wider, you know, during this pandemic, the billionaires in this country, the network went from $2.9 trillion to $3.4 trillion. The riches getting richer, the poorest getting poorer. After the wake of this second wave of Black Lives Matter movement with the debt of George Floyd, which was so personal, you know, it was, it really hurt our community and the rest of the world. And what I saw companies do was performative activism. All of a sudden, they wanted to get into social issues.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every two hours, exactly. And people don't know that you put on SPF in the morning, right? And you feel really protected for the day. But that thing only lasts two hours.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of times, it's gimmick, like products will have 15 SPF, and it's a waste of my time because I need 50 for me because I use reciprocats, right? I'd rather just use the SPF. I'm going to use anyway. And then use the products independently.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, waterproof, yes, SPF, I make a point not to put SPF in my products for two reasons. Once you infuse SPF into a product, it becomes very hard to perform a dark skin because it's a white base. That's why they only make the light shift because, you know, once you put in SPF, it changes the base white. So when you're going to really, like from my skin complexion, it would be okay, right? Because of our formula. But when you get into the real deep shade, it starts throwing back this gray kind of flashback that I don't like. So I don't put it in there. And I also think another thing about SPF is a very personal thing. People don't realize this. The SPF needs for, for instance, really fair skin is different to the SPF need for dark skin. SPF need also changes based on what skincare you're using. Do you use retinols? Do you use any product that counter the sun that would change your requirement? People should always buy the SPF separately to their products. And I know people want to do it for convenience, but it's really critical because SPF is so unique to what you're doing with your skin.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your partners, and now we now have a business where right now my dot com is now over 70%, almost 80% of my business. So what's happened to us in the end is it's allowed us to get more intimate with our customer. And that has really driven a lot of growth. So out.com is making way more money than any of our retailers used to make. It's really allowed people to see us for who we are outside the shadow of the retailer, to actually go who is Arma Beauty as a brand what are they? They getting to know me, whereas before I was so busy, I was always on planes. I did not have time to do interviews or be on live or have the level of intimacy that I now have with my customers.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know at the moment we're 12 people, we were a much bigger team last year and we shrunk it down strategically this year because last year we were growing way too quickly from our liking. Like they got frantic, you know, and I felt like we had to take a post, slow down, and build the foundation of the brand properly. Because if you don't build a foundation, all the growth that you get is going to collapse at some point. So for me, it's always a marathon, not a sprint. So I deliberately shrunk the size of my team. Most of my business actually comes from retail. Relaunched 203 altar stores me in self-ridges, you know, in Oxus Street, which is massive business for us. So most of our business actually came from retail. And one of the challenges we had was when we launched, the retailers named almost overshadowed the brand name. Everybody knew Almer Beauty Alta. That was sort of what they knew, right? So people were buying altar.com, not our website. So that was an issue that we had coming into this year. In a way, the pandemic has addressed for us because all of a sudden people started seeing us as an entity outside altar or self-ridges or all our reach.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making them and sending them down there and just having people, you know, health be at risk. So it's really sad. And I remember growing up, even in Nigeria, people had to use like white talcum powder as a face base because there was nothing. And then there was like three shades of what we used to call pancake. Pancake is the original foundation made by Max Factor. Three shades and everybody would rub it and look orangey and look crazy. And that was what was available. So it's crazy when you think about it.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. You know, I did a whole series on my Instagram stories once where I was traveling as I was traveling, I was showing them what was available in South Africa, in South Africa. You go into the department stores and you can't find dark shades. And that's ridiculous. You know, it's just completely ridiculous. A lot of countries that are African countries still can't find it. And what's also sad is because of the effect of colonialism, even in Africa, the standard of beauty is still very Anglocentric. It's still fair skin. It's still straight hair. The biggest skincare product in Africa is skin bleaching products. Alcare is anti-aging. There is skin bleaching because everybody must be lighter. You won't have some people putting their music, some musicians putting their music to go, oh, light skin girls and how they prefer light skin girls. You hear men talk about this quite openly that I love my girls to be light skin. So all the girls, you know, going to bleach. And this was actually a big problem because you started having products with mercury, high doses of hydroquin, formaldehyde, really bad stuff that we're not allowed to sell here.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, exactly. I think, you know, for me, one of the most common themes in my life is always standing up for what I believe is right and always fighting for a better world, you know, from being expelled when I was in high school for mobilizing everybody to go on strike because it was the conditions weren't great and I had to mobilize everybody to go on strike. So they went on strike. What we wanted, they got it, but I was the scapegoat. So as I labeled the troublemaker, right? So, you know, leaving college and going, hey, why don't we have good color cosmetics in Nigeria? And I reached out to all the brands and Revelon was the only one who responded positively. And they've been trying to come into the country for 15 years and they couldn't. And it took like the craziness of a teenager not knowing how to take no for an answer. And that was how I got into.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I grew up in a lot of parts of Nigeria. My family moved around a lot because my dad was a hotelier. So I spent a lot of time in Lagos. I spent time in Wari. I consider myself a Wari girl. People don't know where Worry is. It's like, I joke about people. I'm like, you know Harlem. They're like, yeah, I'm like, or, you know, Campton, yes. Okay, make it like 30 times more extreme and you've got worry. Like it is hardcore. It is really like so much culture. It is street. It is wild. And that was where I spent the longest time, but it's an unknown place on the map, but it's very, very notorious to just be in that place.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, but they do, but they just hide it and they'll talk about it because society sort of like, oh, makeup is a thing that chicks use and it's not for men. And it's like, no, it's for everybody. And anybody who's on TV, they use makeup. Like they put it to mattify the skin, you know, to accentuate certain parts of the camera can catch it better. So every man who's on TV, it says use makeup. So yes.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, makeup is for everybody, and I absolutely used my concealers all the time, like when you have dark circles, he would cover them, he would have like, you know, imperfections. So he wore makeup, even though he was the most manly man. And I mean, a lot of his friends didn't know that because of just society is not ready for it, but he did wear makeup, even though he wasn't like super disciplined on the skin.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody are different, right? And I think that's the craziness of the world. We keep pretending like we're the same. We're not the same. What your skin needs is completely different to what my skin needs. Yet every brand, even the ones who are claiming to be inclusive, will create the same product for everybody, but the needs are completely different. So we created six different skin families and then we customized the formulas between each family's to target the unique needs of your skin, to target the way your skin is structured, the common concerns of your skin. So we put that all together in a foundation. And that's why our website is built that way where you start from what my skin family would sort of identifies where you are and then you go down. We've got 51 shades. So it can be overwhelming. So we help people really consolidate because once you find your skin family, you only have to select between six to 12 shades depending on your skin family. We help you work out your undertone, which is all about the shade of your skin. And once you've done that, you really have only three products to select from. So it makes it super easy, super intuitive.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Alma Beauty is the range of Colorcosmetics. We're highly inclusive brand. I founded Alma Beauty because I was frustrated with the state of the beauty industry. I was working within beauty for the longest time and just got frustrated with how non-inclusive it was. And in 2017, 2018, they still were not catering to most people. You know, they were only catering to one particular audience. And that frustrated me. So I wanted to go and create a movement. I wanted to create a brand where everybody could find themselves. And all my beauty is a brand that has been founded on inclusion, self-love, self-expression, authenticity, and really enabling and inspiring people to show up every day as their best selves. And we were very fortunate to have launched with Alta Support in 203 stores and launched in the UK as well with self-ridges. And, you know, it's been an amazing year. We're only one year in the market and continue to challenge the industry, continue to be outspoken, continue to be advocates whilst at the same time.”
2020-07-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Live with Sharon Chuter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT