Handmade refillable candles by Black Wall Street Pop-Up vendor and founder Ronda Shehee at a previous pop-up. Credit: Courtesy of Black Wall Street Pop-Up LLC
A pop-up market featuring all Black-owned businesses aims to promote the circulation of the Black dollar this weekend.
The Black Wall Street Pop-Up will take place Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on the first floor of Polaris Fashion Place at 1500 Polaris Parkway. The pop-up will feature 25 vendors, including boutiques, candle makers, bakeries, natural beauty brands and African clothing brands, according to the company’s website and Rhonda Pettey-Shehee, owner of Black Wall Street Pop-Up and Soleil Candle Collections.
The event will be a larger version of the company’s 1st Saturday’s Black Wall Street Market, which occurs on the first Saturday of every month at Eastland Mall at 2740 S. Hamilton Road, according to the company’s website.
“Our event that’s going to be held on the 19th at Polaris mall really changes the game,” Pettey-Shehee said. “There’s a difference in demographics when it comes to the foot traffic that you would have at Eastland Mall versus Polaris mall.”
Pettey-Shehee said she and her daughter, Shayla Reynolds, had hosted other pop-up events for several years to gain exposure for her company and her daughter’s cupcake business, Sweet Bliss Cakery. The company, established in January, is named after the original Black Wall Street — an affluent, Black business and residential area in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was burned to the ground by a white mob in the early 1900s, she said.
The 1st Saturday’s Black Wall Street Market was first held around August of 2020, when many small businesses, especially minority businesses, were struggling with shutdowns, Pettey-Shehee said. The lack of brick-and-mortar stores made pop-up markets and e-commerce the best ways for independent businesses to expand their platforms and receive support from buyers, she said.
“It’s especially important for me to have a cupcake business represented in this type of pop-up specializing and focusing on Black History Month in particular,” Reynolds said. “We don’t see a lot of cupcake companies within our community, specifically for specialized cupcakes, and so that was really important to me to just be able to bring that type of product to our community.”
Tennille McDaniel, event planner for Black Wall Street Pop-Up and owner of Lois Lane Events, said the pop-up is important to the community because it shows how much of a footprint Black business can actually have on the economy, as well as the impact Black-owned businesses can have in building generational wealth for the Black community.
“Black Wall Street is very important because it sets an impression on our community to let us know how we can come together, how we can purchase from each other and what our buying power looks like,” McDaniel said.
Vendors such as Cakes by Timbo, a cake-and-cookie business owned by four-time Food Network winner Timbo Sullivan, cosmetic and skincare brand Mazo Beauty and fragrance oil brand Kreative Scents were selected by Pettey-Shehee after many reached out to the Black Wall Street Pop-Up Facebook and website, she said.
The event is free to attend and aims to promote Black excellence, according to the Black Wall Street Pop-Up website.
“Excellence to me means excelling at every multitude that you can and just knocking it out the park,” McDaniel said. “I feel like when we look back on where we’ve come from, as a culture, and where we’re going, I feel like Black excellence has been happening since the beginning of time, and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.”
