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Black Travel Box with Orion Brown

Writer's picture: Lipi GanatraLipi Ganatra

Orion is currently executing a crowd sourcing campaign on the IFUNDWOMEN platform offering exclusive rewards for funding the business. You can find out more here.


Kenny sat down with Orion Brown, the founder of Black Travel Box, to discuss her product line that focuses on making travel easier for people with melanated skin while visiting different parts of the world.


Orion is from the southside of Chicago and originally went to college as a pre-med student. In her third year, she shifted from pre-med and started studying management training to get into the corporate space. After working in corporate and consulting with Fortune 100 companies, Orion wanted to create something all her own.

You know what it is like to go on a trip for self-care and have to wonder if you need to pack up the whole bathroom sink just so you can look good and feel good while you are out. And if you are on vacation to relax or find self-care, you shouldn’t have to worry about special travel hacks to find something, anything, that might help you with your textured hair and skincare routine.

“Why is it so hard to find products for people of color, or people with textured hair, or people with melanated skin?”

This pain in the Black travel experience led Orion to develop the Black Travel Box.


Black Travel Box wasn’t created to be a product sitting in a retail store waiting for you to find it. Retailers play to products that balance how much space they are given with how much product the brand can put on the shelf. However, for the African American community, we are lucky if our products are incorporated into the shelves, and not put in a corner labeled the “ethnic section.”

Orion chose a direct-to-consumer approach that allows her to control when it is shipped and saves you the time of having to search this store and that store to see if they even carry it for you to purchase. For this reason, Black Travel Box is streamlined with the necessary products that are becoming the MVPs of melanated hair & skincare.


Black Travel Box is engineered to last a long time and give you what you need without suggesting a “dime sized” portion that doesn’t work for us. You know you squeeze the bottle a little extra the first few times.


Orion is looking to the future of her company and thinks that being in retail would be a nice addition at some point. However, with retail beauty brands tanking right now, she isn’t looking to be the clean up that saves these large beauty brands.


Retail spaces have been blind to the Black dollar and their stereotypical mindsets about where we shop and how we shop are changing because they need us. Black women spend 9x more than other ethnicities so having our dollars in their stores sounds appealing, and Orion wants to do what is most efficient for Black Travel Box and cater to the melanated community.


Black Travel Box is rooted in the new black travel movement of self care and wellness. There are so many places and ways it can grow, and Orion is excited to grow and see all the places Black Travel Box can go.

As a Black business owner, she unpacked a few things to share with others in our community who might consider getting into entrepreneurship. For the Black community, entrepreneurship is generational - from the barbers, corner stores, and even the cleaners, these are all black business owners and entrepreneurs.


Looking out into 2021 and beyond, Orion has a few goals.


She wants to keep her name in your mouth so you keep talking about Black Travel Box.


She wants to provide more awareness and gain some more media impressions through engagement on social media. Help her reach her goal of 25,000+ travelers engaging and talking about Black Travel Box.

To achieve world domination beyond 2021, Orion says she just wants to be ready when the opportunity comes. Her vessel is ready to pour into others and for her cup to be filled as well.


Stay engaged. Stay excited. And keep doing what you have to do so you can travel when you want to travel. Connect with Orion on Instagram, LinkedIn, & Facebook to learn more about Black Travel Box or listen to the podcast episode on the Beyond Normal Podcast website.



The Beyond Normal Podcast is sponsored by Velourit. Velourit is the global supply chain management system built for the small minority business owners. It is an example of how to create a company that drives value with a purpose.


Brooke Sinclair is the CEO of Velourit. She says, “2020 forever changed the way investors interact, engage with, and learn about startups while working from home, remotely, and over Zoom. We’re moving away from the physical Silicon Valley to a more conceptualized version where we reference “Silicon Valley” to mean the ecosystem of technology.” You can find out more about Velourit here.


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