On Thursday morning, brand strategist and a coach Orion Brown stopped at her workspace at Saltbox Warehousing and Logisitcs in Northeast Park Hill to prepare some merch that she sells through her company Black Travel Box. She’s taking it to a conference she’ll speak at this weekend.
“It’s basically a travel-ready hair and skincare [line],” she said. “Products that actually work for us,” she said, referring to Black women and women of color whose textural haircare and skincare needs are not always met by mainstream products. “I've built it to give travelers of color products that actually work [for us.] You go to the hotel and you just laugh at the lotion bottle. You're like, ‘No, we can't put that on.’ You laugh at the shampoo and you miss out on the benefits of being able to have the things that you need when you're traveling.”
Brown, 43, who also coaches others to build their brands, is one of the speakers at BizLifeCon, a conference for women entrepreneurs over 40, that will take place Friday and Saturday.
Barbara Brooks, 58, a former marketing executive from Colorado Springs now based in Denver, is organizing the conference. An enthusiastic, chipper cheerleader for the event, she likes using terms like “aging out loud,” “middle-escence,” “mid-life quest” instead of “mid-life crisis” and “chapter number” as a euphemism for age. She has organized the conference for the past eight years, and this one will be held at Comedy Works South in Greenwood Village.
Hundreds of women will meet for motivational sessions on leading their own businesses, taking career breaks, financial planning, using AI, and landing a job in or after the fourth decade. There will also be talks about menopause, later in life ADHD diagnoses and gaining brand visibility, according to Brooks, who will do one of the opening talks.
The event is organized through Brooks’ Second Act Women, an incubator and event business that promotes empowering women over 40. Her website describes it as “a weekend where we bring back the boldness, the fun, and the hell-yes energy of the past, minus the Aqua Net and questionable fashion choices.”
“We’re making sure that women …have the opportunity also to network with one another, and all of our sessions are learning sessions outside of our panels where there's going to be the conversations . . laptops open notebooks going, we're learning things because . . .a lot of us have been there, done that, so we need to make sure that we are getting things that we ordinarily can't,” said Brooks.
Self-care and being aware of health changes that occur over the lifespan will be among the topics speakers will touch on, and that includes a subject some women don’t want to speak about publicly: menopause.
“It's great that we're finally talking about it,” Brooks said. “That it's not hidden; that this is a part of life; it's who we are, and the idea that there's over 80 symptoms to menopause and not just those that come to mind: the hot flashes, the mood disorder.. . A lot of us didn't know brain fog was a part of that and some of the other things,” she said.
She said she’s looking forward to the presentations women speaking at the panel will offer on content creation and branding.
“It's a billion-dollar industry and women, particularly over 40, need to enter this industry, not only to elevate their companies and their visibility, but also because we need more voices amplified that are over 40 in the world of content creation,” she said.
That’s one of the things Brown will focus on in her presentation Saturday, her first time participating to represent her 9-year-old start-up.
“In this particular case, it's going to be using my brand as an example . . . talking about essentially the core pillars of what brand building is and how to create something that's really compelling,” she said.
Asked for specifics of her talk, “From Idea to Market: How to Build a Standout Product Brand That Attracts Customers & Opportunities,” she said she’ll be “using consumer insights, understanding the marketplace, and having really just a clear understanding of what you want the brand to mean . . . so I'll take folks through brand foundations and architecture and how to get to those insights.”
Brown said now is a great time for a summit like this one, because the shift away from DEI is impacting her businesses and the demand for her product, which sells at about 100 units a month.
“I think it's a really challenging time for particularly Black women in the beauty space and business owners,” she said. “We've seen a lot of businesses honestly just shut down and shutter, especially with some of [the] most recent DEI conversations.”
She said she gets good feedback from customers as far away as Kenya, and she’s determined to keep going, despite not being in a position to spend much on ads.
“I'm at a place of 10 toes down continuing on with the business,” she said.
Besides Brown, other speakers include just one man: Michael Bevis, director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship for the City of Denver. His talk is “Free Small Business Tools and Resources.” Also on the agenda is “3 Steps to Navigating Your New ADHD Diagnosis After 40,” given by Sarah Blake of Sarah Blake Consulting.
Overall, Brooks said, BizLifeCon this year will be about “talking about aging out loud and what does that mean to own this time in our lives and be prideful of the chapter number!”
