Meet the woman behind BlackExpo, a platform dedicated to businesses run by the black community in China
- Olivia Nadine co-founded BlackExpo, China’s first physical market space for the black community, in 2017
- BlackExpo organises four events every year, twice a year in Beijing and Shanghai each, and last month launched an expo in Shenzhen too
When Olivia Nadine first arrived in China in 2010, as a business school exchange student from Ohio State University to Peking University, she found it was hard to buy beauty products as a black woman.
“I remember every time I tried to find face cream here, it was always bleaching, or whitening,” she said. Nadine moved to Beijing permanently in 2016, after gaining a graduate degree in Asian studies and business from Georgetown University in Washington.
“You just can’t get certain products here. I would see on WeChat people asking where [they could] get shea butter, or this fabric, or this thing that is culturally relevant,” the 29-year-old said. “Someone would send a contact card [WeChat contact], but there wasn’t a stable place to find [these products].”
In 2017, she co-founded social enterprise BlackExpo, China’s first physical market space for the black community, with Ugandan artist James Sswerwadda in Beijing.
Inspiration came from her own experience of founding Tianmi Bakery, a baking business, and selling produce at weekend markets that run at virtually full capacity and can charge up to 1,000 yuan (US$143) from vendors.
