Ami Colé closed its doors in 2025, and the headline everyone ran with was the investment climate. That's real. That's documented. It's also not the whole story — and Diarrha N'Diaye-Mbaye told us the rest herself.
In a piece about the brand's journey, she described herself as a foot soldier — doing the market research, processing the DTC transactions, handling the customer outreach. Most of it, by hand, most days. That is not a founder's job. That is what happens when the infrastructure underneath a brand isn't working nearly as hard as its founder is.
Diarrha built Ami Colé from the most honest place there is — her mother's Harlem hair salon, her own years-long search for a foundation shade that actually matched her, a community that had been asking for exactly this brand out loud. She got it into 600+ Sephora doors. She built brand equity most founders spend a decade chasing and never catch 💐.
She was doing way too much. And the devastating part is how much of what she was carrying by hand had a technical fix — one that could have felt completely personal to her audience and still freed her entirely.
Here's the part that rarely makes the retrospective: the platforms carrying her business weren't really built to hold it. Most DTC beauty brands run their entire operation on the same handful of big-box commerce and payment platforms, because it's the path of least resistance. That means account freezes with no warning. Payment holds that land exactly when a drop needs liquidity to move. A platform relationship with zero context for what you built or who it's for — and zero recourse when it decides to hold your own money hostage. When that happens, the appeal process is a support ticket. That's not a foundation. That's a risk with a login screen.
The Questions I Would Have Asked Diarrha
1️⃣ What was your cart abandonment rate on mobile, and did you actually know what was causing it?
2️⃣ Were your email and SMS flows triggering off customer behavior, or were they broadcast sends on a calendar somebody had to remember to update?
3️⃣ Who processed your payments, and if that account had frozen mid-drop, what was the plan — or was there one?
4️⃣ Could your inventory system tell you, today, which SKUs were trending toward a stockout in the next 30 days — or would you find out from a customer's DM?
5️⃣ How much of your day counted as tasks technology should have been doing for you, quietly, in the background, while you did the parts only you could do?
The Baddie Stack Prescription 💅🏾📱⌨️
🧺 A CRM and community data layer. Every DM, every survey response, every repeat customer tagged and fed into one system instead of a spreadsheet somebody has to remember to update — a live read on who's a repeat buyer, who's lapsed, who's high-LTV, so each of them gets spoken to differently without her writing every message herself.
📊 Predictive inventory intelligence. Not stock tracking that reports what already ran out — sell-through modeling that flags what's about to, early enough to reorder before a loyal customer hits a sold-out page and doesn't come back.
🔐 Payment and platform redundancy. A processing setup that isn't one company's decision away from freezing her cash exactly when a launch needs it moving, built so a hold on one rail doesn't take the whole business down with it.
This breakdown can be customized with a Digital Systems Scan
The product was never the problem. Diarrha built something hundreds of thousands of people wanted, from the most personal place a founder can start. The infrastructure underneath her was the gap — and it's a gap technology has gotten dramatically better at closing since the day she first launched.
This is the digital love letter to you, Diarrha — from one Baddie to another.
If any part of this sounds familiar — the spreadsheet doing a database's job, the DMs you answer yourself because building the automation felt like one more thing, the quiet dread of what happens if a platform ever locks you out of your own money — that's not a discipline problem. That's information.
Start with a Digital Systems Scan: Discover
Stay Savvy, Baddies 💅🏾.
Tech Baddie Out.