LABRIAH HOLT
Founder of Sweetroots Hair Bar

I come from strong, sweet, and Southern roots. From a family of changemakers who may not have multiple degrees, or show up in a Google search, but who have committed their lives to spreading love and nurturing others.  I was raised to value education as the gateway to progress, and to never forget the humble roots that I came from, but to use my experiences to serve as a social engineer in my community.

 

After years of being a lawyer in big law and working in government/policy, but never feeling like I was working close enough with the community, I decided it was time for a change. Time to re-evaluate what it meant to be a changemaker. I became more and more interested in entrepreneurship and the health and beauty space. So, with the green thumb I inherited, an ongoing struggle to maintain my own hair (the #IWokeUpLikeThisLook is hard when you have natural textured hair!), and the loss of my younger sister, I planted a seed in 2015. And just like I was raised to, I put all my blood, sweat and tears into helping it sprout.

 

By September of 2016 I was busy, booked and blessed. I was married, living in Atlanta, and about to invest in a barbershop on Westside. A barbershop that just so happened to be next to an unutilized salon space, in the heart of an area without healthy food options or high quality products or services.  The building was an old staple across the historic Hunter Street Baptist Church and next to a Clark Atlanta University dorm.

 

I decided the opportunity to be a changemaker didn’t have to happen in a courtroom or corporate setting.  For me that meant no longer looking at the community from above, but living among the community I wanted to serve.  You see, Sweetroots isn’t just a salon to me, it’s a revitalization of a cornerstone in a community where people like Martin Luther King Jr. used to congregate and empower the people.

 

And for me it’s about empowering the people of Atlanta, specifically the women. As an African American woman with natural, thick, long, curly hair, I struggled for years to find an efficient service, that is consistent and reasonably priced, that would take care of my locks. As a traveling professional for work, I found it unfair that my non-textured friends could easily get their hair done before a business presentation in any of the cities we traveled to. I, on the other hand, would struggle with up-keep because none of the places they went to were guaranteed to have someone familiar with my textured hair, or accustomed to regularly doing textured hair. The whole experience left me begrudged and with a bitter taste in my mouth.

 

With Sweetroots I have said no more to feeling bitter. I have made it my mission to make the hair salon experience sweeter, because I refuse to let the hair industry fail us any longer.  I want to nurture and spread beauty one person, one strand and one community at a time, by giving you the service you deserve and tending to the beauty you were born with.