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Atlanta is a well-known hub for Black entrepreneurs. From health and tech to arts and culture, countless Black-owned businesses have successfully launched here, including the empires of Pinky Cole and Tyler Perry.
Because ingenuity has no age limit, 11-year-old Zoe Oli has joined that list with her doll company called Beautiful Curly Me.
“It feels really awesome to be able to run my own company and to also do good in the community,” said Oli, who is the company’s CEO and runs the business with a lot of help from her mother, Evana Oli.
Beautiful Curly Me, founded in 2019, won third place and $20,000 last month in a Barclays small-business contest that attracted 14,000 applicants nationwide.
“It really shows me that so many people believe in me and my business and really want to support me on my mission to raise the next generation of curly and confident girls that will change the world,” said the Atlanta girl, whose company donates one doll to a child in need for every doll sold.
While other kids are still playing with toys, this Mount Vernon School student is making them. But Beautiful Curly Me dolls are about more than having fun. They are designed to give girls, like Oli, dolls with hair and features that look like their own.
“When I was 6 years old, I did not like my hair and I wished it was straight like my classmates,” Oli said. “My mom did everything she could to help me, and one of the things she did was get me a Black doll. I loved her, but she did not have hair that looked like mine, and I wanted dolls with curls and braids.”
Not seeing herself — with a head full of thick, curly locks — reflected in traits deemed “beautiful” by toy makers started chipping away at her self-esteem. The link between lack of representation and internalized self-hatred has been well documented over the decades.
Famously spotlighted in the 1940s “doll test” that played a role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Black children were more likely to attribute positive qualities to lighter, white dolls and to prefer them over the dark-toned ones. Other studies have reached similar conclusions.
Today, films like Disney’s latest version of “The Little Mermaid” are putting more diversity on screens and toy shelves, but Oli knows there is always room for more.
“It was very important to me to make sure the dolls all had curly hair and the right features,” Oli said about the process of designing her dolls. “There was a lot of back and forth with our manufacturers working on the hair, the eye and skin-tone colors.”
She even includes matching life-size and doll-size bonnet sets to make bedtime hair-care routines more fun. “When a girl has one of our bonnets and learns how it takes care of her hair, this makes her love her hair and feel more confident in herself,” Oli said.
All of Oli’s work is paying off. She sees it in the responses from parents and children who feel uplifted by the dolls and the company’s other products.
“Every single time I see a review or when a parent contacts us telling us that their daughter is feeling way more confident in herself because of the doll, book or puzzle, it makes me feel like the journey and all the challenges have been worth it in the end,” Oli said.
Now that school’s out, Oli is taking time to enjoy the break with family visits, sports and reading. But in between tennis matches, she is still empire building. She is adding stuffed toys to the Beautiful Curly Me product line. She is also working on a podcast and leaning into her interest in speaking and acting after giving a TEDx Talk last year about her company and her life.
“Confidence is a journey. We all have ups-and-downs, but the key is to keep going and work on building it up every day,” she said.
Oli isn’t playing around.
