Black Excellence: Omar Bailey
https://www.fctrylab.com/pages/about
OUR SNEAKER STUDIO & LAB IN LOS ANGELES HELPS CREATORS IN ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & BUSINESS BUILD THEIR BRANDS THROUGH EXCITING FOOTWEAR.
State of our Art
At FCTRY LAb, we constantly innovate to create exciting footwear that turns heads – from fashion models to pro athletes. We’ve setup an end to end resource for creators and brands to build and launch new products – from a world class team to a State of the Art Studio and LAb.
OMAR BAILEY
Omar Bailey is a trailblazing force in the footwear industry who has helped bridge the gap from conceptual design into physically wearable footwear during his extensive career. With over 20 years of global product development and manufacturing experience as a design engineer, he built his reputation developing footwear for entertainers such as Jay-Z and Lady Gaga, athletes such as Karim Benzema, José Bautista and Jalen Ramsey, among others.His professional trajectory includes roles at renowned industry brands including New Balance, K-Swiss, Adidas and Timberland. His passion for sneakers led him across the globe – including China, India, and Saudi Arabia – where he immersed himself in the culture and gained a deep understanding of the bridge between design and contract manufacturing. Omar’s journey into the world of footwear design commenced at the age of seven in his parents’ New York home, sketching out his earliest designs. Educated at esteemed institutions like the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and the College of Design, Architecture & Art at University of Cincinnati, he honed his craft, pursuing degrees in industrial design.
Black Excellence: Ufuoma Okharedia
https://www.nerridofoods.com/about
We’re glad you’re here. Our passion is to bring the taste of traditional African foods to your tables with little or no hassle.
Preparing authentic African dishes could take hours on the stove. Over time, as many Africans migrated from the villages, cities and countries of birth, they left family “chefs” behind, along with delicious African cuisine recipes. This is an effort to keep traditional african foods alive.
Ufuoma Okharedia, a mother and wife, is the CEO and Founder of Nerrido. When she left Nigeria, she realized there was a gap with availability to traditional African meals. She sought to create accessible authentic African foods and sourced authentic ingredients locally. As a result, she shared her joy of cooking online while also selling blends of tomato stew for jollof rice.
Black Excellence: Jim and Sheila Wallace and Karla Trotman
Electro Soft, Inc. (ESI) was founded by Jim and Sheila Wallace in 1986. ESI is dedicated to the creation and demonstration of linked component product lines, quality, and service. The company strives for the very best in all three areas and is dedicated to operating on a sound financial basis of profitability, growth, and increasing the overall value for customers and partners.
Electro Soft is expanding its sales in strategic areas like lead-free or RoHS assembly. The company’s focused strategy to provide quality and service at competitive prices and profitable rates has effectively positioned ESI to meet or exceed its client’s expectations.
Karla Trotman
Karla Trotman, Electro Soft’s CEO, has been with the company in one form or another since its founding in 1986. She started out cutting wire by hand and earned 25 cents an hour for sitting at a bench and using a ruler to mark the various lengths she had to make for her father. She graduated to stripping the wires, and eventually to helping operate the wave soldering machine.
Black Excellence: Howard Allen
https://www.maroonsausage.com/our-story
Maroon Sausage was created in a collision of cultures that can only happen in a place like New York City, where people from around the country, and the world, come to share in each others’ cultural experiences. That being said, the jerk chicken spice blend used in our sausages came about in a very natural way—in the kitchen of a couple in Brooklyn. One of whom is originally from the Chicago area, where people eat lots of sausage, the other with roots in Jamaica, where people often use jerk. And there you have it—jerk chicken sausage.
Maroon Sausage Company is an expression of flavors created in the mountains of Jamaica by the Maroon people long ago…I added their story
and flavors to the sausage game.
– Howard Allen, Founder and Owner
Black Excellence: Hannah Mayree
A banjoist, multi-instrumentalist, producer and vocalist, Hannah shares original and traditional banjo compositions as well as harmonies through acoustic live vocal looping and reminds us of the power found in our relationship to the earth, music and community.
They co-founded and creatively direct the Black Banjo Reclamation Project which is currently creating musical, cultural and land-based opportunities for Black, Afro-Diasporic communities around the world to work with the banjo as a tool for reclaiming ancestral wisdom & creating Afro-futures.
Black Excellence: Calvin Duncan
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5464700/the-jailhouse-lawyer-calvin-duncan
Wrongly convicted, he became ‘The Jailhouse Lawyer’ — and helped free himself
Calvin Duncan was 19 in 1982 when the police arrested him for a murder-robbery in New Orleans. The eyewitness testimony at his trial was unreliable, but Duncan’s lawyer offered only a minimal defense, and he was sentenced to life in prison.
While in prison, Duncan studied law, hoping to appeal his case. In the process he became a jailhouse lawyer — officially as part of the Inmate Counsel Substitute Program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
Black Excellence: Michaela Rose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaela_Rose_(athlete)
Michaela Rose (born 13 June 2003) is an American track and field athlete.[1] Rose set a US collegiate indoor track record in 2024 over 600 yards.
Black Excellence: Jerrelle Guy
https://www.chocolateforbasil.com/aboutus
Jerrelle is an award-winning author and celebrated food photographer with a passion for cooking, baking and storytelling. She received her Bachelors from the Rhode Island School of Design and her Master’s in Gastronomy from Boston University. She merges her backgrounds to create work that explores the intersection of food, culture, and self-expression. Her debut cookbook, Black Girl Baking, a James Beard Award nominee, weaves heritage-inspired, alternative recipes with reflections on the therapeutic power of baking. Through her newsletter, The Dinner Ritual, and her upcoming second cookbook, she continues to challenge the notion that food is merely sustenance, inviting readers to view cooking as a deeply personal and restorative practice. Based in Dallas, Jerrelle collaborates on creative food projects while developing streamlined recipes for The New York Times. Her work emphasizes intuitive eating and cooking, creativity in the kitchen, and the role of cooking in self-care, healing, and confidence-building.
Black Excellence: Whitney Roberts
Founder Whitney Roberts has spent years working in the cheese industry as a monger, maker, and educator. For years she’d seen the lack of diversity and wondered how she could make cheese more accessible to BIPOC individuals. In the summer of 2020, she founded the Cheese Culture Coalition with the goal of making careers in cheese, animal husbandry, and land stewardship more accessible to marginalized communities.