Yelitsa Jean-Charles is a young entrepreneur who filled a personal market gap in a very efficient manner. As a girl, Yelitsa couldn’t find many dolls who looked like her, and so at Rhode Island School of Design she made mockups for a Black doll with hair that stayed curly. She took the project one step further and worked on turning it into a business with a social innovation fellowship. Once done with undergrad, Jean-Charles developed Zoe, the first Healthy Roots Doll, and raised enough capital from Backstage Capital and others to launch the company in 2019. Healthy Roots’ flagship doll featured washable and stylable hair made of special fibers that would bounce back to natural-looking curls, and this summer the business took off. The technology used to make realistic hair coils is an example of a 0 to 1 idea; it hadn’t been done before. Jean-Charles has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30, and hopes her dolls can contribute to the Haitian economy as well (she is Haitian-American, and plans to return to Haiti and sell Healthy Roots Dolls there).
Yelitsa’s entrepreneurial concept for Black and Brown dolls with natural and stylable hair is impressive because it directly resulted in making a small improvement on the lives of some kids who will come after and potentially walk in her footsteps. Her entrepreneurship journey is interesting because although she didn’t know she wanted to design a product and become an entrepreneur before college, RISD helped her learn it was what she wanted to do, and she was able to wholeheartedly pursue it fresh out of undergrad with a fellowship before seeking venture capital.
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Great job with this! I love that she saw this need and made this product. I’m sure there were many other girls just like her who thought the same thing Yelitsa thought. Now they can benefit from her product and have a doll that looks like them as well!