Diarrha N’Diaye Talks Myths Of Black Founders And Venture Capital

By Noel Walker

A quick Google search of Ami Colé reveals that with $1 million in financial backing, the brand filled a void, bringing much-needed products to the Black beauty industry. So when news broke on July 17 that founder Diarrha N’Diaye was closing the brand and would be off Sephora shelves in September 2025, the beauty community was gutted. N’Diaye‘s self-authored piece in The Cut asked a question that reverberated across the industry: “My beauty brand offered Black women shades they couldn’t find elsewhere. Why wasn’t that enough?“

Today brings a different headline. SKIMS announced N’Diaye as executive vice president of Beauty & Fragrance, effective Nov. 3, where she’ll lead product development and brand strategy for Kim Kardashian’s beauty venture. But weeks before the press release, N’Diaye sat down with BLACK ENTERPRISE to discuss what really happened with Ami Colé.

The Therapeutic Mindset and the Pattern Recognition Trap

The path to raising that million dollars began somewhere unexpected: therapy. Growing up in a Senegalese family where asking for money was culturally taboo, N’Diaye found herself fighting psychological barriers before she could even think about pitch decks.

“For me, it took literally almost like a therapeutic mindset of, OK, why am I asking for money? I’m not asking for charity, for personal benefit. This is really for the business,” she explains to us in an interview. The breakthrough came from reframing capital entirely—not as a handout but as energy. “The unlock was thinking about capital as energy. So if I’m going to bring something to life, you literally need a battery to make sure that thing is on, continuing to go strong.”

This mental shift transformed how investors perceived her, because in venture capital, insecurity has a price tag. “They’re going to know when you’re feeling insecure about the ask or if you’re asking for too little,” N’Diaye says. “I don’t think deserving is the word, but I do think that they can take advantage. There are different things like valuations and other merits that could easily be reconsidered, or you get the shorter end of the stick.”

As one of only 30 Black women to raise over $1 million during the pandemic, she carried statistical weight into every investor meeting. But being part of that group didn’t mean investors would be lenient. It was quite the opposite. “It was always the elephant in the room. Investors don’t like to talk about that; there were so few solo women of color,” she reveals. She actually had to be quadruple prepared because venture capital operates on pattern recognition, continuing to bet on the same models that already work. Most pitches are “we’re gonna be the Uber of XYZ” or “the Glossier of XYZ” because investors need you to plug into frameworks they already understand. When you’re building something genuinely new, you’re not just pitching a product; you’re reeducating investors on why the unfamiliarity matters.

Despite working at Glossier in research and development and actively trying to distinguish Ami Colé’s DNA, investors defaulted to the easiest comparison anyway. “I really tried to change their mindframe because I knew that we were not going to be on the trajectory of a Glossier, wanting to be a unicorn and all these metrics that probably would not be true to this brand in terms of our intention, our speed, our cadence,” N’Diaye expressed. The comparison stuck regardless.

Without access to friends-and-family funding rounds, a bleak reality for many Black founders whose communities can’t provide that initial capital, the stakes felt impossibly high. “It felt like literally zero to a million. Like, no in between,” she recalls. She built networks through former colleagues, raising capital simultaneously, business panels, and crucially, the Clubhouse app during its pandemic peak. This was the beginning of The Black Beauty Club with Tomi Talabi, where founders like Olamide Olowe of Topicals, Maeva Helene from Bread, and Abena Boamah-Acheampong from Hanahana Beauty would pop in, sharing notes. After 150 rejections, the funding came through. But securing the capital was just the beginning of hard lessons.

What They Don’t Teach You About Retail and Scaling

Landing in 250 Sephora doors sounds like validation. N’Diaye learned that without understanding retail machinery, even dream partnerships become traps. Looking back, she wishes she’d started with 20 doors instead. 

“Ask retailers what’s the bare minimum you could do both for dot com and in-store because they’re two different beasts. I promise you, they will give you a recommendation. Most retailers are grateful that you’re asking these questions because it shows a level of intentionality and desire to succeed,” she affirms.

But getting everyone aligned on the same growth strategy proved nearly impossible. Sephora operates with certain assumptions about inventory and sell-through. Investors expect different trajectories. “You can’t have Sephora agreeing on one thing, but your investors agreeing on another plan because the math won’t work, someone’s going to be let down, and you’re probably going to be burned out,” she says. With different investors who valued intentional growth over explosive scaling, the entire trajectory might have shifted. “I would go a different route. I’m a mom of two now. I would not immediately ascribe to that model of high growth, and I would not do so alone. I do think that in future ventures, I would start with a partner.”

Then there’s the data gap no one wants to discuss. When Ami Colé performed inconsistently across markets, N’Diaye started asking questions the beauty industry couldn’t answer. She points out that major corporations deployed task forces to understand Latinx consumers, conducting on-the-ground market research. That same rigor never materialized for Black consumers. “I think there are only about two to three Nielsen studies on Black consumerism, specifically to beauty. Even making my deck, I was scraping the internet, bugging all of my friends who worked at corporate for access to their MPD. The information is not even out there.”

The most fundamental question remained unanswered: where are Black and brown women shopping? Sephora, Ulta, Amazon, TikTok shops, the patterns keep changing. Understanding how shopping behavior shifts as Black women gain economic mobility exists in group chats and word-of-mouth recommendations, but there’s no centralized research. “I don’t think it is the brand’s full responsibility to understand the market because that’s not true for other markets or companies. If we really care, let’s sit down, let’s figure it out. Like, I don’t think anyone’s actually doing the work for that.”

The competitive reality crystallized during a therapy session: “I felt like I was building a rocket ship with papier-mâché right next door to NASA.” On one side, LVMH-backed brands like Fenty with nine-figure marketing budgets and global infrastructure; on the other, Ami Colé with venture capital and community devotion, couldn’t compensate for the resource chasm. “Fenty is amazing, all these LVMH-backed brands give good quality products, but they’re not touching the community and talking to them the way that I am, which was part of our point of differentiation. The problem is scaling that without the machine. You can make the best pancakes in the world, but if you can’t afford rent, there’s no more pancakes for anyone.”

A Different Model for Black Beauty Leadership

N’Diaye’s appointment as EVP of Beauty & Fragrance at SKIMS represents what she’d already identified as necessary: partnership and infrastructure. Kim Kardashian, who acquired Skkn by Kim from Coty Inc. in March and folded it into SKIMS, recruited N’Diaye specifically for her community-building approach. “I want SKIMS Beauty to be a place where everyone feels represented, and there was no better person to help us do that than Diarrha,” Kardashian said in a press release. 

N’Diaye’s vision centers on what she learned through Ami Colé. “SKIMS is for everybody, and now we’re trying to create beauty for everybody,” she said in the press release. The role offers resources her independent venture couldn’t access: infrastructure, capital, and the ability to scale inclusivity without doing it alone.

The timing adds weight to what’s been happening across Black beauty. The class of 2020—brands that emerged during the racial reckoning—have faced unprecedented struggles. Former Glossier grantees Ceylon and The Established have shuttered. Hyper Skin is crowdfunding for survival. The tragedy deepened in August when Sharon Chuter, founder of Uoma Beauty, was found dead at her Los Angeles home at age 38. At the time, Chuter was in a legal battle alleging that during her 2023 medical leave, investors used her absence to sideline her and sell Uoma’s assets to MacArthur Beauty without her consent. The case remains unresolved.

When asked whether this pattern represents coincidental market forces or something more deliberate, N’Diaye chose her words carefully.” Listen, we live in America. We know that there’s a lot of dismantling that we’re still trying to do, and the system can only work if it works at the top. We’re watching DEI being literally erased. So you can’t help but to think. I would hope not, given that it’s literally 2025. But I can’t help but be really observant.”

When N’Diaye told The Business of Fashion that “no one had the answer to how to scale a diverse, melanin-rich brand,” she articulated what the industry refuses to face: these aren’t individual failures, they’re systemic ones dressed up as market forces. Her new role at SKIMS may offer a different model for scaling inclusivity in beauty. Rather than independent Black founders navigating impossible odds alone, N’Diaye’s position suggests that partnership with established brands might provide the support structure that venture capital alone couldn’t deliver. For Black founders watching this journey, her transparency reveals why great products and devoted communities still aren’t enough when the system itself hasn’t changed.

RELATED CONTENT: Skims Taps Ami Colé Founder Diarrha N’Diaye-Mbaye To Lead Beauty Division