We had the good fortune of connecting with Kirsten Geter and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Kirsten, career-wise, where do you want to be in the end?
The end goal is to leave an impact on the economic stability of the black community and to aid in the creation of more resources for the black businesses that will follow us. My personal goals have always included the growth and success of those around me. It fueled my career as an educator, it drove me to coach and to sponsor dance teams, it propelled my cooperative publishing company, and it is was the original idea for Fillenoire Life. Being able to help others to become their best versions has always been a part of who I am at my core. The company has taken that and exploded it beyond the singular into the communal idea of building black businesses and thus positively impacting the black community’s ability to employ our own and own our own and leave legacies for our children to have a head start on their own paths in whatever endeavors they have.
Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
We are a black marketplace focused on providing a space and platform that focuses on black businesses and other BIPOC businesses. I will say the primary thing that makes us different is that we do not require any registration fees from our vendors. Their success is our success in that we do not benefit from them unless they make a profit from being on our platform. It is indeed a interdependent setup in which we all must do our parts for the success of the whole, It has been a worthwhile yet difficult climb as we are 100% personally funded at this point. The majority of the technical, marketing, and even now product design has taken place with the three partners: my fiance Rommel Saint Preux, my daughter Jasmine Geter, and myself. I will say that this has caused us to really do the work of educating ourselves on the many aspects of e-commerce over the past couple of years and has made the company even dearer to our hearts due to the work and resources poured in.
If I could tell the world anything about our brand, it would be that every aspect of the company was crafted around what would benefit our vendors most and what our customers deserved in a shopping experience. Fillenoire Life truly has been a work of passion for the celebration of black femininity and the belief in the possibilities of black entrepreneurial success on large scale for every company that registers for our platform.
Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My story is the continuation of my parents and grandparents. My grandparents on both sides were sharecroppers. My mother’s family worked their cotton farm with my grandfather always striving to eventually own the land he and his worked so hard to cultivate only to have someone else reap the benefits. My father’s family work in peach orchards until my grandfather took the leap to work elsewhere which was not welcomed by the peach orchard owners. Family legend tells that he would sneak off late at night to go to work and to come home to avoid those attempting to keep him in the orchard. He lost his life over his choice. This passion for benefiting from their own work continue through the blood especially for my father. He became an entrepreneur in his thirties and worked his entire life sewing back in to those he cared for, those discarded by much of society as unemployable, and by aiding family members in reaching for their own goals outside of the field in which he worked if he could in any way. I grew up seeing the importance of giving back, the necessity of planting seeds, but also the reward of having something that you can call your own. So these are the primary people who poured into me. However, there have been many others who have directly or indirectly influenced my desire to pour back into my community. My fiance and business partner also helped me to reach beyond my initial idea for Fillenoire Life which was a much smaller scale of only selling my merchandise for my motivational speaking. However, his big vision helped push Fillenoire Life to become a space for other black businesses to find a platform on which they can sell their products and provide their services and be the focus and not a small area or specialty isle.
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