Jackie Aina has inked the first co-branded collaboration for her lifestyle company, Forvr Mood.
Aina’s Forvr Mood and Canadian whisky brand Crown Royal have created a limited-edition Crown Royal Blackberry x Forvr Mood candle, which will be available for purchase online and at the Crown Royal Blackberry Stand (a lemonade stand, but make it adult), per a press release.
Throughout her career as an influencer, Aina has amassed more than 3.5 million YouTube subscribers. She has also worked with major beauty brands, from Anastasia Beverly Hills and Sephora to Fenty Beauty. Aina’s made a name for herself as a Black woman within an extremely competitive industry. However, she will rarely turn down the opportunity to use her platform to amplify and support other Black women, and this recent partnership is no different.
While attendees sip Crown Royal Blackberry and shop the Forvr Mood candle, Crown Royal is also collaborating the nonprofit Black Girl Ventures Foundation by providing a platform for rising founders.
Since its launch in 2016 by serial entrepreneur and computer scientist Shelly Bell, Black Girl Ventures has aimed to empower underrepresented and underfunded small businesses through access to capital, community, and capacity-building resources. The organization’s goal has always been to help businesses achieve key milestones leading to economic advancement through entrepreneurship. Per its website, Black Girl Ventures has funded 450 companies and held over 75 programs across 15 cities.
That mission continues through its participation in this latest initiative. The new collaboration includes a $50,000 donation to the Black Girl Ventures Foundation through the Crown Royal Generosity Fund with half of the proceeds supporting enhancements to the BGV Pitch program.
With programming like the Emerging Leaders Fellowship, BGV NextGen, and BGV Pitch, the organization is using the funds to ensure that founders who look like and represent the culture they serve have the materials they need to provide for their communities.
In the hybrid program, the Black Girl Ventures Foundation combines pitching with crowdfunding by remixing the traditional pitching experience. According to the organization’s website, the BGV Pitch program “democratizes funding by allowing the audience to vote with their dollars using the Raisify platform for the founders whose pitch they favor.” Founders have three minutes to pitch and three minutes to conduct a question-and-answer segment with the audience.
“Crown Royal is a major legacy brand,” Forvr Mood’s Aina said in an interview with Blavity. “And they reached out to us, which was a huge deal and definitely caught us off guard because we’re like, ‘Whoa, we’re still like newbies in the game; we’re still a small business.’ And obviously every opportunity, big or small, matters. But this is particularly monumental for us.”
