Business owner celebrates Afro-Caribbean products despite battling invisible disability

A Brighton-based mother-of-three who lives with fibromyalgia has spoken of how she started an Afro-Caribbean-focused business in lockdown.

Lara Reynolds, 39, founded Melanin World Plus during the second lockdown of 2020 to both help her find a lifestyle that better worked around her disability and reflected her passion for her heritage.

“There’s no treatment for fibromyalgia besides pain killers,” she said. “It started when I was in junior school and it gradually deteriorated. I spent all of my teens chasing a diagnosis. It got dramatically worse when I reached my 20s.”

Living with chronic pain and fatigue, Lara’s day-to-day life can often fall to depression – heavily affecting her usual work.

“Some days are boom and some are bust, there are times I feel like I can do a lot due to the low amount of pain but other days I just stop and my whole body seizes up and I can’t move for hours or days at a time. I even had to give up ballroom dancing and martial arts,” she said.

“When you’re a disabled person as well as a minority you work twice as hard to prove yourself. I started Melanin World Plus in response to being told I wasn’t going to be able to achieve because of both my colour and my health as a child at school.”

The business, which offers iconic products with an Afro-Caribbean theme, was a way to accommodate Lara’s illness – a 24-hour business that she could still run on her off-days from her part-time job.

“I can leave it alone for a few hours a day if I’m unwell,” she said. “It can be tricky but it suits my way of life as opposed to working for an employer full-time – simple challenges like sitting at a desk all day can be hard for someone with an invisible illness.

“I wanted to focus on my Afro-Caribbean heritage as a response to the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. Like many black people, I had a lot of anger that I’d not acknowledged for many years. This event reignited the fire inside me, so I decided I wanted to do something positive and incorporate that passion into my life as well as my new business.”

Lara said: “Lockdown was the prime time to start a business with so much more online activity and the Black Lives Matter movement had created change – with more black businesses pushed to the forefront. I noticed customers have inquired about being a black-owned business and buying solely for that purpose –they want to buy from black communities to support them. So we network with other black-owned businesses to offer products and services that come from a place of passion just like my own.”

The Black Pound Day movement, started by Swiss from So Solid Crew, has also been especially important to Melanin World Plus. People are encouraged to spend money with black-owned businesses on the first Saturday of each month. The business has had great support from the Black Pound Day official website as well as their partners Ona.deliver.