Today’s Black Blogger Pioneer is Patrice Grell Yursik.
Patrice is the owner of Afrobella.com. Afrobella is widely known as one of the first, if not the first, brown beauty blog. It was the first one I had ever encountered, and was so delighted to see that Patrice wasn’t a supermodel shilling products, or some celebrity looking to find another platform to help them stay relevant. Patrice created a place where we were alerted to product lines that were made just for our skin, our natural hair, and our overall beauty.
She’s been featured just about everywhere, and rightly so. Ebony Magazine, Glamour, Fast Company, and more. She’s worked with Target, and even created her own lipglass with MAC cosmetics. The woman is legit!
Patrice is a pioneer because she saw a void within the internet space, combined that void with her passion, and provided for her community. She was one of the first online writers to accomplish this, and many have followed in her footsteps. Her success is bountiful because she continues to provide quality content, and sticks to what she knows. I remember listening to Patrice at BlogHer 2013, and what she said still sticks with me, “I run a business, and I treat it as such. My meetings are business meetings. I am a business owner.”
Thank you, Patrice. Thank you for exemplifying what it means to use our websites as stepping stones toward long-standing and substantial businesses.
