Aurora James, the designer and businesswoman who started the Fifteen Percent Pledge (which asks retailers to devote 15% of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses), is no stranger to adversity. Not just as a Black woman who started her own company from scratch, but as a visible figure in the sadly divisive struggle for racial equality. But she’s not letting any of that slow her down.
“People have threatened my life on multiple occasions,” James tells Glamour as she was being honored as one of our 2022 Women of the Year. “For every one horrible person that tells me that I need to die, there are three other entrepreneurs in my inbox telling me that they were given an opportunity because of the Fifteen Percent Pledge. I have to focus on the light and not let the dark pull me down, but I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t hard sometimes.”
She admitted that sticking her neck out in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent racial reckoning in America wasn’t an easy decision. “I really was terrified to do it,” she says. “It’s a lot easier to just sit in your earned comfort than it is to alienate a lot of the people at this table that you worked very hard to get to. But I felt like I had managed to earn a certain level of access, and it was time for me to use my own privilege to advocate for other people who had not yet been given the opportunities that I had.”
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Scary, maybe, but, for those who know Aurora James (like her friend AOC), hardly surprising. She’s always been a risk-taker.
“Sometimes your best mode of transportation is a leap of faith. Everyone is like, ‘Well, how could you have launched your business with only $3,500?’ Well, I only had $3,500, so what else was I to do?” she asks, rhetorically. “And sure, I could have gone and taken a job working for another designer, but that wasn’t what was going to give me purpose in my life. I only have one life, unfortunately, and I really feel like it would be inappropriate to squander it doing something that didn’t give me a sense of purpose.”
