If you don’t know what’s possible, you can’t reach for it. But at the same time, life has a way of unfolding in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine.
In 2011 Felisha Noel closed The Wagon, a boutique she co-owned and ran for four years. Devastated, she wouldn’t know that about eight years later the wife of America’s first Black president would be wearing a Fe Noel design.
At nineteen years old, Noel, known to many as Fe, was managing daily operations for the boutique she co-owned in Brooklyn, New York. The American born daughter of Grenadian parents, Fe was forecasting performance, tracking profit and loss and buying merchandise, all while pursuing a degree in finance at Marymount College. It’s easy to wonder how someone so young could undertake so much, or even know where to start. But the entrepreneurial spirit was in her DNA. “I come from a family of entrepreneurs,” she told I am Grenadian in a 2018 interview. Her grandmother owns a restaurant in Grenada and her mother, Sonia Noel, owns a daycare in Crown Heights. Noel watched her mom build her business from the ground up, and that example not only showed her what was possible, but showed her what it took to run her own business.