If I’m being honest, BrandPolish didn’t start as a business idea.
It started as something that just didn’t feel like work.
I was introduced to marketing in the 8th grade by my business education teacher, Ms. Posley. She gave us a project where we had to create a product and build an entire marketing campaign around it. Most people treated it like an assignment.
I didn’t.
I found myself working on it during my free time. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I liked thinking through how something should look, how it should be presented, how people would experience it. That was the first time I realized I didn’t just like “projects”, but I liked creating.
And that makes sense, looking back.
I went to a performing arts school from 4th through 12th grade. Dance was my major, art was my minor. I’ve always been in spaces where expression, creativity, and presentation mattered. Even before that, I was the kid who made PowerPoints for fun. First grade me was already in her design era, I just didn’t have a name for it yet.
As I got older, it followed me everywhere.
In college, I somehow became the designated “make it look good” person for every organization I joined. Social media, flyers, graphics—if it needed to be created, it got passed to me. Same thing at home too. Family events, random designs, even my mom’s presentations for her 5th grade class… I was always making something.
I didn’t think of any of this as “building a skillset.” It was just what I did.
But there’s a difference between doing something well and realizing it’s something you could build on.
That moment came during a phone call with my line sister, Tiana. We were talking about things we wanted to do—she was saying she wanted to start an event planning business, and I was just throwing out ideas. Logo concepts for her, rebrand ideas for another one of my line sisters… just talking, not thinking too much about it.
And she paused me.
“Just do it. Make it a business.”
It wasn’t even a long speech. Just very matter-of-fact. Like… why are you playing with it?
And the funny part?
I already had the plan.
In my senior year at Hampton University, in my Organizational Behavior class, I created a full business plan for BrandPolish as a school project. The structure was there. The idea was there. I just hadn’t taken it seriously as something real.
Until I did.
BrandPolish wasn’t a sudden idea. It was a collection of everything I had been doing for years, finally being called what it was.
This blog, Chipped Polish, is where I’m going to talk about all of it. The beginnings, the lessons, the things that don’t always look perfect while you’re building something meaningful.
Because sometimes, things don’t start polished.
Sometimes they start chipped.
