How Aurora James of the Fifteen Percent Pledge tapped a groundswell of support for Black-owned businesses

In the spring of 2020, fashion designer and activist Aurora James published a post on social media calling for large retailers to get serious about supporting Black-owned businesses.

The kernel of her idea was simple: Since 15% of Americans are Black, she argued, big retailers should dedicate 15% of their shelf space to products made by Black-owned businesses. James was motivated in part by a forecast that more than 40% of Black-owned businesses were at risk of closing permanently as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors.

The concept immediately resonated. After tagging a number of big companies in her post, James launched a petition that garnered nearly 100,000 signatures within a day. She then quickly incorporated the Fifteen Percent Pledge as a nonprofit advocacy group. Within 10 days, the first large retailer, Sephora, joined the pledge.

Since then, the group has signed 28 major companies, including Google, and James expects the initiative to drive an estimated $10 billion in revenue to Black-owned businesses in the United States. That success has created a new urgency to identify and organize those businesses into a database retailers can use to activate on their pledges.

“Every quarter, we’re making recommendations to them of Black-owned businesses that we think makes sense to scale into their shelves,” said James.

Google, for its part, has committed to scale its free digital training to companies in the database to increase their visibility across search and digital commerce channels.

But the work doesn’t end there. James says there is a fundamental change underway in how big companies take action to support communities of color — away from optics and toward meaningful action. She wants the Fifteen Percent Pledge to help them realize that transformation.

“It’s not just about how many people of color are in your advertising campaign,” she says. “It’s about how many people of color are working in your retail stores, and then graduating into corporate. And how many people of color are on your board.”