Camille Bell and Johnny Velazquez’s homes are overflowing with boxes. The co-founders of the beauty company Pound Cake handle each and every order themselves. “We interviewed and met with a couple of fulfillment centers, but they’re expensive and it takes out that personal touch that Johnny and I are looking for,” says CEO Bell, who also works full-time as a digital marketing manager.
“We wouldn't say foundation is universal, so how can we think all lipsticks should be the same? You and I have different skin tones and undertones, so we are also going to have different lip tones,” Bell says. “So that's why we take one shade of red and make different variations of it so that people with various skin and lip tones can achieve that perfect red look.”
“If you, as a company, are going to be pro-Black and Brown, yet you're excluding a certain type of person, like a fat or queer person, then you're not really pro-Black,” Bell says. “I even feel uncomfortable when people say, ‘Oh, you made this just for women,’ because, being pro-queer, we don't feel like cosmetics have a gender. The values all work together.
"At that point, Johnny and I were like, ‘F*** it, we're just going to go to our own community,’ so we did an Indiegogo campaign at the end of 2017 and raised a little more than $20,000. We met our goal. Then after that, we got two additional grants and finally won a pitch competition, so we took all that money and went to our first lab in 2018.