Tracee Ellis Ross on Killing Perfectionism and Finding Self-Love

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 5 August 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The multi-tasking actor, executive producer and beauty entrepreneur shares her personal journey with BoF’s Imran Amed and explains how she unlocked her full potential across a variety of pursuits.

Background:

Tracee Ellis Ross is best known for her roles in Girlfriends and Black-ish, but she is also the founder and CEO of Pattern which she launched in 2019 after more than a decade of development to address the gap in the market for products designed specifically for curly, coily, textured hair.

The Golden Globe-winning, Emmy-nominated Ross joins BoF’s Imran Amed on The BoF Podcast to talk about managing the little voice in her head, killing perfectionism and cultivating self-love and acceptance.

Finding purpose and unlocking potential starts by interrogating what you love, then finding ways to merge who you are with “what makes your heart sing,” said Ross.

Key Insights:

Pattern was born out of frustration. Ross couldn’t find the right tools or products to serve her needs, and never saw Black women being centred — despite sitting at the centre of culture.
Ross took learnings from developing a clothing line with JCPenney to help get her business off the ground. From there, she sought out the right partners. Key to evaluating partners was learning to be present during conversation.
In her work with Pattern and with companies like Ulta on diversity and inclusion, Ross hopes to dissolve the myth that Black hair care and beauty is a niche market.

Additional Resources:

Modernising the Black Hair Care Market: A new wave of start-ups shaking up the textured hair care space are catching the attention of major retailers and investors, grabbing more shelf space and venture capital.
Building the Glossier of the Black Hair Market: With her new DTC beauty brand, Radswan, blogger-turned-entrepreneur Freddie Harrel is pitching clip-in textured hair extensions and wigs to the digitally savvy black consumer.

To subscribe to the BoF Podcast, please follow this link.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion.
0:06.5	Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, August 5th.
0:10.7	Tracy Ellis Ross is a multitasking actor best known for her starring roles in girlfriends and blackish,
0:17.3	a budding executive producer with multiple projects in development, and also a beauty
0:23.5	entrepreneur with pattern, which she created to address a gap in the market for curly, coily, and
0:29.4	textured hair. This week on the BOF podcast, the Golden Globe winning Emmy nominated actor
0:34.9	joins me to share her personal journey and talk about managing the
0:39.2	little voice in her head, killing perfectionism, and cultivating self-love and acceptance.
0:45.2	It all starts and ends with a clear sense of purpose.
0:49.1	What makes your creative juices in your body start to flow?
0:53.4	And how do you merge who you are with what makes your heart sing?
0:58.0	And usually in there you'll find your purpose.
1:01.0	And when you find that, then you got to be willing to do the work.
1:05.0	You've got to be willing to take the hits, to learn from each moment that's there.
1:14.5	This is a really special conversation, which I enjoyed so much.
1:16.7	I learned a lot. I hope you will too.
1:20.4	Here's Tracy Ellis Ross on the BOF podcast.
1:25.3	Tracy Ellis Ross, welcome to the BOF podcast.
1:34.7	It's such a pleasure to have you here. You know, you and I've had the occasion to chat at fashion dinners and events, but we've never... We have been Milan, we've been Paris. In the last year, a couple of months, I feel like we've had so many interactions. It's been lovely.
1:43.4	And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation because there's so much to talk about.
1:50.3	And what I really like to start with is just a little bit about your background.
1:55.1	Of course, everybody knows you from your work on Blackish and, you know, from the amazing superstar mother you have,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Business of Fashion, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Business of Fashion and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.