It’s been a crazy entrepreneurial ride for Tope Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of Fayetteville startup Reflekt Me.
Mitchell is on a mission: To have brands reflect their actual customers and to change the world along the way.
Mitchell was a consultant, working as a product manager and consumer insights expert with Fortune 500s. She found herself leveraging her sociology background in conversations with corporate America, “Helping them to have more inclusive messages," she said.
But she didn’t initially set out to create a startup.
“When you’re working nine to five and you have kids, you’re not really focused on jumping off into entrepreneurship,” she said.
That changed when she caught her daughter watching herself in the mirror.
“She just loved every part of herself,” Mitchell said. “As a mom, I was like, whoa, I have to change the world for her. … I want this little Black girl to love herself.”
So she dove in – working to help brands use diverse faces, from race to body size.
“So many issues that women in particular have stems from not seeing themselves reflected,” she said, pointing to the traditional ad stereotype, which zeroes in on a size four model, despite the average woman being a size 14.
She and her co-founder – her husband, Gerald Mitchell, who has a doctorate in education leadership – created a demo. And within two months, they won a people’s choice pitch competition, Black Women Talk Tech 2019.
“I was down on the ground, rapid fire pitching to like, a thousand people,” she recalls.
It was a rush.
“I got to actually see, hot off the presses, people have audible gasps,” she said. “Women were like, ‘I’ve never gone to buy a shirt and clicked and it’s my literal size.' … For them to see just these real women in shirts, I started to see the feels. We pulled at the heartstrings.”
Leveraging resources
Mitchell knew that in order to push out her concept from Fayetteville, she’d need help. So she won spots in competitive accelerators like Creative Destruction Lab and the Women Entrepreneurs Boot Camp. She partnered with Backstage Capital, leveraging resources that wouldn’t have been available without the virtual opportunities that've emerged during the pandemic.
Mitchell was able to raise about $95,000 in a friends and family round. She funneled in tens of thousands of dollars of her savings.
The result? A company pushing for representation, diversity and inclusion in e-commerce. Reflekt Me has created an enterprise solution intended to help e-commerce companies be representative of all of their potential customers. Its tool allows sites to match the characteristics of the shopper, from size to skin tone to hair texture, in the images they show via user and influencer generated content.
Creating empathy
Mitchell sees a major business opportunity – but she also views Reflekt Me as a way to change perceptions trough diversity. She points to “Star Wars” shifting from being a “universe of all white people to showing diversity.”
“That makes people who watch SciFi more empathetic,” she said. “It humanizes people who are different from them, and validates people who look like more diverse casting.”
She sees Reflekt Me’s mission as doing that through brands, and she wants to keep doing it in North Carolina.
“There’s rainbows here every day for some reason,” said Mitchell, who moved here from Chicago. “You can have a good life here.”
As Reflekt Me took off, she considered moving to California to be closer to the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.
“The check sizes are bigger,” she said. But with so many accelerators and entrepreneurial workshops moving online, she found she could leverage far-away resources from home – and raise two young children at the same time.
It hasn’t been easy – she recalls being up all night with her son, born in 2020, and giving pitches the next day – but it has been rewarding.
Being in Fayetteville, birthplace of George Floyd, whose death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers last year re-sparked the social justice movement, further drove home the mission.
“So much of it is a love thing,” Mitchell said, noting diversity creates “empathy for other people.”
“When humanity to you is only one color, is only one person … when people see one image they just associate that with reality,” she said.