WILMINGTON — Within the first year of launching her business, Creatively Covered Co LLC, Dawn McDowell’s skincare line, Unwind, took off on the local Wilmington scene after a city influencer posted a review of its handmade products. Within the same year, McDowell’s socials — her primary marketing strategy and what gained her business local fame — were hacked. Since then, she has struggled to bring numbers back to where they used to be.
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“My social media presence, in terms of following, still has not reached back up to even the 34,000 that I had earned or garnered within the first few months of my business,” McDowell said. “My will to keep going took a hit.”
With the Minority Chamber of Commerce launching in early 2026, McDowell is hopeful it will provide her the community she needs to expand her business and network.
Unwind was one of the first 14 businesses to apply for a membership through the Minority Chamber of Commerce. Started by Atiba Johnson, the nonprofit is dedicated to the support and networking of minority-owned businesses in Wilmington, and even the greater Cape Fear area.
“There are a bunch of resources here in the area. Everyone doesn’t know who and where those resources are or how to get to them,” Johnson said.
Currently registered within the Greater Wilmington Chamber of Commerce are 11 Black-owned businesses and four Latin American-owned businesses, according to the GWCC website. Johnson said these businesses are invited to the Minority Chamber, aimed to fill in gaps and become even more inclusive of the local business community.
“The chamber’s done a great job in implementing some of their programs, [but] it didn’t reach everyone,” Johnson said.
Johnson sees an opportunity to work with the Greater Wilmington Chamber and said the CEO, Natalie English, has reached out. Port City Daily called and emailed the Greater Wilmington Chamber to ask about the minority businesses within its network and whether there are any plans to connect with the new chamber but did not hear back by press.
As of this year, the state of North Carolina has more than 340,000 minority-owned small businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Association. The numbers have grown annually in the last few years, escalating from 264,000 in 2023 to 308,000 in 2024.
Johnson said his goal is to have 300 minority owned businesses join the newly launched chamber by the end of 2026.
The Minority Chamber of Commerce has been on Johnson’s backburner for the last two years. The owner of several businesses in Wilmington, including Front Street Market & Produce, S & J Concierge, Regal Events DJ Services, and Coastal Transport & Shuttle, Johnson is deeply involved in the African American entrepreneur community. On top of all his businesses, Johnson is also a public speaker on entrepreneurship and is a business advisor with Channel by Live Oaks, a small business center for minority entrepreneurs.
“The community trusts that my board and I are not gonna lead them astray,” he said.
The Minority Chamber’s board is made up of local minority business owners in Wilmington, chosen by Johnson. Annual membership to the chamber is $150 for nonprofits, $300 for small businesses, and $500 for corporations.
Aside from being a networking organization, the minority chamber will host business education courses, training sessions and workshops monthly. The organization won’t officially launch until January.
“But this isn’t a cookie-cutter thing because all businesses are different,” Johnson said, “and so their needs will be different. We have to get those individuals in and help them get to where they’re trying to go.”
Johnson added he hoped the chamber would help minority business owners overcome obstacles — for instance, bureaucracy is top-of-mind.
“When you talk about minority businesses, history shows us that they normally won’t get bank loans, so they won’t go to the bank to get a loan for fear of being turned down,” Johnson said. “That’s a difficult situation — to put your whole life, words, and thoughts into a business plan and sit across from a stranger and have to divulge that information to them. Then if you get a ‘no,’ that deflates a lot of people, and it’s hard to come back from that.”
According to loan statistics from the Small Business Association from 2023, only 16% of Black business owners were fully approved for a bank loan. Only 19% of Hispanic business owners, and 15% of Asian business owners, were fully approved. This is compared to 35% of white business owners.
While McDowell didn’t have trouble with bank loans for Unwind, she faced issues applying for the federally funded Airport Concession Disadvantaged Business Enterprise certification program. Overseen by the U.S. Department of Transportation, it allows small businesses owners from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds to have an airport stand.
McDowell, like other small businesses, wanted to expand her business’s reach to travelers. Currently, she operates Unwind online and through social media; getting her products into the airport would give her an in-store market.
While she already applied for a certification to be considered for Wilmington International Airport, McDowell struggled to meet with the Department of Transportation and make progress on the certification process — until this year. McDowell finally got an appointment to speak with an agent.
Then she was told: “Because of all the things that they’re doing with DEI, our means to help with these certifications right now, we don’t know how we’re gonna navigate with that.”
The certification program received funding cuts and rule changes due to the new federal stance on DEI initiatives. The government removed race and gender as automatic criteria for Disadvantaged Business Enterprise eligibility, part of the national trend to dismantle DEI. The criteria on race and gender were the basis of McDowell’s original application; now she’s unsure if she has to submit a new one, or wait for the agency to reach out again once it has acclimated to new rules.
McDowell is preparing for a grand re-launching of Unwind in 2026 — officially putting the hacking fiasco from a few years ago behind her.
“I’m doing a restructuring,” she said.
McDowell is hoping her connections through the Minority Chamber will illuminate other business owners’ experiences going through the airport stand certification process. If not, even talking with others to find alternate ways to expand Unwind beyond social media and online would be helpful.
McDowell said getting into the inner circle of the business world, even locally, is difficult for minority owners.
“But in our community, the black and brown community, and other communities outside of predominant business world, we weren’t made privy to a lot of these [conversations],” McDowell said, “unless you just happened to hear about it or you happened to be friends or in association with someone who let those things out.”
Johnson called the Minority Chamber’s focus “connecting the dots” — keeping everyone in the know.
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