Money Talks: The Black business owners who forged a partnership in uncertain times 

Welcome to Money Talks, a series in which we interview people about their relationship with money, their relationship with each other, and how those relationships inform one another.

Nicole Alesi is a 42-year-old New York native who has been running Nicole Marie Paperie, a stationery company, since 2013, and whose cards are featured in more than 100 retailers, including TJ Maxx. Constance Panton, a 52-year-old Baltimore resident, is the CEO and founder of Bifties Gifts, a gifting platform that allows people to buy Black, support small businesses, and donate to charity. The two met in 2020 when Panton was looking for Black-owned businesses selling products that could be included in Bifties gift boxes.

The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited.

Nicole: I started as an illustrator, and I was looking for affordable ways to communicate my artwork. During the holiday season, people were always asking, “Can you draw me a card?” So I decided to mass-produce one. At the same time, I was walking through the stationery shop at a drugstore and I noticed that I didn’t see cards that really spoke to me. These cards always had a message inside in a font I didn’t like.

I was also very tired of coloring my face in, you know? I just didn’t see cards that represented me or my friends, who were about ready to get married. This was before gay marriage was even legal, and I was, like, “I don’t see cards I can send that are appropriate for their weddings!” I felt really inspired to draw what I know and love, and it took off from there.

This is one of my original cards. A wedding card. We’re talking about, like, 2013? It was such a fun time to explore. It felt like social media was smaller. You could post something and it felt, dare I say, a little bit kinder? I was able to find my illustration community, and a community of makers on Etsy, because this was around the time of the handmade movement. It was post-recession. Everyone was laid off, and people were starting to knit scarves and make things. I was thinking, “Maybe this will be my profession now.”

It was a great time to try something different. It felt potent and exciting. Nicole Marie Paperie — it just made sense, because Marie is my middle name, so I’ll never get tired of it, I’ll never regret it — and Paperie, it just went together like peanut butter and jelly, so why not?

Constance: Bifties started in 2016 as a gift exchange. This was during Tamir Rice, Eric Garner — I was starting to get really depressed. I was starting to really feel it, and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be really great if I could just give the Black community a hug? Give everybody a hug, because it’s tough right now, being a Black person in America.”

It was around the holidays, and serendipitously my aunt invited me to a gift exchange. The only thing you had to do was pay $5, and it went to a ladies’ charity, and then she matched you with random people to buy gifts. I thought, “This is fantastic. I’m going to do the same thing, but instead of $5, just buy your gift from a Black-owned business.” We’re going to give an economic hug to the Black community.

I ran that gift exchange for about four years, and there were a lot of challenges. This was pre-George Floyd, and many people weren’t “buying Black.” I’d have people send a gift to someone, but they bought it at a big-box retail store, and it was an African print. Or they got something from Mary Kay because the Mary Kay vendor was a Black person — there were a whole lot of different versions of “buying Black.”

The other component was a lot of my non-Black friends were, like, “This is a call to action for Black people. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be participating.” I said, “No no no, this is a call to support Black businesses!” When you combine all of that together, the people who didn’t think they could be involved in this opportunity, the gifts I didn’t think were matching my idea of what I was looking for, I decided in January 2020 to launch Bifties as a service.

What is Bifties? I literally took the words “Black,” “best,” and “gifts” and made it into “Bifties.”

Bifties are a community of people — yes, it’s a noun — regardless of race, color, religion, and creed, who buy the best Black-owned gifts. The “giving B(l)ack,” with the parentheses, is because a portion of our proceeds goes to charity. It’s like “giving back, giving Black.”

In 2020, I launched that, and I said, “Okay, now you have no excuse. No matter what you look like, no matter what you believe in, you can go on this site and you can build your own gift.” And I curate the gifts! I don’t have to worry that you bought it at a big-box store or from the Mary Kay lady down the street. I was able to create the lane that I actually wanted, and that’s how Bifties came to be.

Nicole: The month that she launched, January 2020, is really important. It was a wild year.

Constance: Yes it was. I launched Bifties as a platform in 2020. Come May of 2020, with the George Floyd incident, it was an opportunity — here I am, trying to get people to buy Black regardless of who you are, and then all of a sudden the nation decided that we needed to buy Black. I had corporations looking for me. I had the exact thing that they needed at that time to show up for their employees, their friends, their family — and that’s what took off for me.

Nicole: I always say that authenticity is key. As much as my cards are art-driven, we’re selling a feeling and an emotion. The only way to communicate that through the internet is jokes, memes, laughter. If I’m not doing a belly laugh when I see this card, “Congrats on your quiet quitting” —

Constance: I saw that one!

Nicole: And I saw your smile. I saw how your face lit up. I couldn’t do this in the ’90s or the early aughts, but thanks to Facebook and Instagram, I can just draw something, and the middleman is gone. That’s very liberating for people like us. Women like us.

Constance and I are both divorced. We’re both moms. I say to her, when things get hard, “We don’t have a choice. This has to succeed.”

We started working together during the Buy Black movement. We didn’t know it would be this thing that we’d get swept up in. It was like getting caught in a maelstrom. There were all of these emotions, positivity and empathy, but also negative emotions like, “I’m an artist, my work speaks for itself.” It was hard to open my inbox and see things that made me feel like people were buying from me because of the way I looked instead of the work I did.

Constance: There are a lot of Black-owned businesses that you didn’t know were Black-owned. I’m doing my market research and I’m putting my boxes together, and verifying who was a Black-owned business before 2020 was very challenging because people weren’t identifying their businesses that way back then.

Now, on Facebook and Instagram, you can put “Black-owned” and “women-owned,” but before then I had to search and dig. I had a lot of companies say, “I don’t want to be identified as Black-owned. I don’t want to be put into a box.” I get that. That’s a real issue. There was a period of time around 2020 when everyone wanted to be identified as Black-owned, but now that we’re coming out of that, we’re having those same discussions again. “My work should speak for itself.”

I want to sell awesome gifts. It just happens to be that everything in that gift box is Black-owned.

Nicole: And you just happen to like it!

Constance: You can give it to your friends and it doesn’t matter because it speaks to everyone.

Nicole: For me, personally, I’m going to keep that hashtag [#blackownedbusiness] regardless. I’m not ashamed — it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Bring back Black joy, number one, and number two, representation matters. I remember being a kid and not seeing anything that looked like me. My mom is Italian, and she doesn’t even look like me. Now you have millions of TV shows with people who look like me and people who have moms who look different from them — there was nothing like that when I was a kid. If there’s anybody, anywhere in the world who sees my artwork, and they look like me, and they’re in my inbox asking, “How do I do this?” it’s my responsibility to pass that information on.

Constance: Long-term, my vision is to have a brick-and-mortar store that you can come into. I want to be the next Black Hallmark! I want you to come in and everything in the store is Black-owned. I want to be in Downtown Disney, too!

Nicole: For me, I would just love to expand the medium. I’d like to see my products on more than just cards — clothes, home goods, that area. I’d also like to explore new creative and artistic areas. I always say, at the beginning of every year, “This is the year I’m going to paint.” I want to paint, I want to consult, I want to mentor. That’s something I love doing — helping people.

Constance: She’s really good at helping people, and she’s an incredible businesswoman. It’s uncanny. I had two business issues, and I came to Nicole, and she said, “Okay, here’s what we need to do.”

Nicole: Because we’re going to Downtown Disney!