The Village NetworkYou already want to shop Black-owned. Woven tells you who to trust.
Spend with intention · Grow with purpose
Download the appDirectories list everyone. Deal apps chase strangers with the deepest discount. Neither tells you which brands are genuinely excellent, the ones worth coming back to.
Woven is built to close that gap. Think of us as the standard of excellence for Black-owned brands: not the biggest list, the most trusted one.
This is the seal a Woven Certified brand earns so consumers know that it's been vetted.
These are the founding partners who earned the Woven Certified seal and committed to the community experience from day one.
Loving Black and Brown businesses means holding them accountable.
I’m Simone, a West Indian educator, curator, and community builder. I built Woven because I love my hometown of NYC and firmly believe in the power of a village. As a daughter of Jamaican restaurant and food-truck owners, I grew up learning firsthand what it means to build from scratch, to serve your community through culture, and to hold yourself to the highest standards of excellence.
Woven is for the people who are interested in exploring the magic of cooperative economics: where brands, members, and community grow because we’re invested in one another. Brands earn the Woven Certified mark by meeting a standard of excellence, and members spend with them knowing why they’re worth it.
We can love supporting these businesses and hold them accountable at the same time. That is how we’re redefining what it means to buy Black and Brown today, and how wealth stays in our community in every form – money, but also knowledge, access, and care.
Spend with intention. Grow with purpose.
— Simone A. Francis
Woven's promise rests on trust in the Woven Certified mark. Our founding advisors bring outside judgment, real standing in Black and Brown community, and a people-first approach to building the Woven ecosystem.
Tap a portrait to read their story.
Jusna is a systems thinker and wellness practitioner who leads with heart, structure, and spiritual grounding. A Director at Basta, she is redefining career access for first-gen students of the global majority. She is the founder of HELD by Jusna, a somatic coaching and facilitation practice, and A Common Center, a civic platform turning compassion fatigue into action. A Brooklyn-based founding advisor to Woven, she believes our communities' excellence deserves to be seen, trusted, and sustained.
Everton is a Brooklyn educator, DJ, and event curator whose work is guided by a Pan-African worldview. By day he works with middle school students and their families, and by night he brings people together through music and events across the city. He is currently completing a graduate degree in Entrepreneurship, where he is building a new perspective on how business can create lasting impact in the communities he cares about. Everton joined the Woven Council because he has lived the problem Woven is working to solve, and he wants to make it easier for New Yorkers to find and support Black and Brown businesses. For him, Woven is personal; it's the kind of platform he would use every single day.
Lonnie, dubbed The Mayor of Brooklyn by friends, is a well-known event curator, connector, photographer and lifelong resident of Flatbush, Brooklyn. In addition to his role as a public servant helping New Yorkers every day, he has produced two weekly series, The Weekend Warmup and The Flatbush Social, a last minute pop-up series, SLMDS, and is a co-producer of Girlstown, a dancehall reggae party hosted by reggae legend Buju Banton. Lonnie's vision and advice have helped businesses like Aunts et Uncles, 333 and The Rogers Garden succeed in bringing fresh ideas to the market that are well-received by those in the community and beyond.
Asiah has called New York home for nearly two decades, building a career in media, tech and advertising as a creative strategist. She is Creative Strategy Lead at Pinterest, where she develops sector playbooks and culturally resonant partnership roadmaps across industries. Before Pinterest, she spent nearly a decade as a Marketing Director at Condé Nast, driving multi-year partnerships and co-founding the Women's Network Resource Group, after earlier work at Ebony, Jet and BBC America. She mentors students and volunteers with organizations that uplift communities of color.
Tony is Co-Founder, President & CEO of Coffee Uplifts People (CUP), one of the most rapidly expanding coffee brands in America. CUP imports directly from six major coffee-producing regions, is sold through Whole Foods, Amazon and Target, and supplies enterprise partners like Pfizer, Goldman Sachs and American Express. Before CUP, Tony spent much of his corporate career in Nike's sportswear division, then co-founded the sneaker boutique WOODstack, where he built community programming from weekly yoga to book clubs and a community library. He is known for storytelling at the intersection of community, culture and conscious commerce.
The Guide is free and open to everyone. Browse every brand that earned the mark across the city, from food and retail to services and experiences.
Members do not pay for a list. They pay to belong to the world the Guide represents, with real perks and first access to what we're building.
Members get first access to new Certified partners, plus perks, events, and features as we build them. Members are BIPOC New Yorkers and the allies who shop alongside them, and every membership puts a dollar back into Black and Brown New York.
First month free, then $18/mo, month to month or billed yearly.
Your first month is always on us. Download the app to join — add your card at signup, and the free month rolls into your plan.
Woven members already committed money to supporting Black and Brown businesses. They are not browsing, they are looking for reasons to use their membership. Certification puts your brand in front of the people who came to spend. There is no fee to be certified.
