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Miss Jessie’s:
Creating a Successful Business from Scratch – Naturally
by Miko Branch
c.2015, Atria
$24.99 / $31.00 Canada
256 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Starting a business is not for the faint of heart.
It takes brains and guts enough to step out of a comfort
zone. It requires going against the grain, letting go of
pride, and a dash of innocence. Starting a business is the
worst, most difficult, wonderful, magnificent thing you’ll
ever do – but as in the new book Miss Jessie’s by
Miko Branch, sometimes it’s also quite hair-raising.
Jessie Mae Pittman was born in 1919 to a sharecropper family
in North Carolina, and grew up hating fieldwork. To avoid
picking cotton, she taught herself to cook and later became
renowned for her skills. That independent self-sufficiency
impressed her granddaughters; Miko Branch and her sister,
Titi, were raised knowing that they’d someday be
businesswomen.
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Throughout their childhood, the Branch sisters learned and
dreamed. They also toiled long hours with their father at
various family businesses, which was work they did for free.
That eventually taught Branch the value of her labor and
gave her a sense of what owning her own business might
entail.
When it was time to enroll in college, Branch decided on a
career in fashion but her schooling taught her what she
didn’t want. Upon graduating from Fashion Institute of
Technology, she’d realized that she needed to work with
hair; specifically, she wanted to work in a high-end salon
that catered to a certain kind of clientele.
“There is a long, rich… complex history surrounding
African-American women’s hair that ties to… self-image,”
Branch says. As a woman with curls, she knew she could make
a better product than what was available. She experimented
with gels, crèmes, and technique before she and her sister
opened a salon that ultimately grew into a full-fledged, hip
and trendy mini-empire with products named after their
grandmother.
But, like many fledgling entrepreneurs, the sisters made
mistakes - one of which led to a split, lawyers, and a
months-long parting that hurt Branch in more ways than one.
It took two years, two moves, and too much money to fix what
broke.
Business book or memoir? Though it may appear more the
latter, the answer is that Miss Jessie’s is both.
Sometimes, of course, the story of a business is the story
of its creators, and author Miko Branch takes her readers
back nearly 100 years to see where the very roots of her
company began. That’s a very interesting tale but if it’s
not what you read a business book for, well, Branch has that
part covered, too. She subtly includes business advice for
entrepreneurs in nearly each chapter, and a nicely succinct
epilogue as a final takeaway. That serves to entertain and
inform readers on one hand, while steadily encouraging
entrepreneurship on the other.
Though I thought there was a bit too much repetition here, I
did enjoy this by-the-bootstraps story of a growing company,
and I think you will, too – especially if you’re up for the
unique format of it. Still, business book or memoir, Miss
Jessie’s is something you won’t mind curling up with. |
