Walmart Shoutout Black and Unlimited at Broccoli City

Building a successful business is far from easy, but the hurdles BIPOC entrepreneurs face are exponentially greater. A 2024 survey found that 86 percent of Black small business owners are concerned about access to capital—many of them are likely to apply for new loans or lines of credit, though they are less likely to receive the full amount they requested. When you encounter significant hurdles to financing, growth becomes a hard-won feat. So how do Black businesses grow? One tried-and-true method: word of mouth.

Even in a digital world where visibility usually means developing strategies to gain attention through online advertising and social media, word of mouth can hold a lot of power. In fact, word of mouth is the reason many Black-owned businesses are successful. According to a survey conducted by Dynata in 2021, 42 percent of respondents said they learned about Black-owned businesses through word of mouth. This is essentially the basis for Walmart’s Black & Unlimited: The Shoutout.

The Shoutout is the latest expansion of Walmart’s long-standing Black & Unlimited platform, which is all about spreading love and proving that personal recommendations have untapped power. Since its inception, Black & Unlimited has supported events like the Something in the Water Festival, hosted a Creators Tour of HBCUs, and put a spotlight on Black fatherhood in partnership with the American Black Film Festival. Most recently, the Shoutout landed in Washington DC’s Broccoli City, a two-day festival celebrating music, culture, and community that welcomed over 35,000 attendees in 2023. There’s no better place to get exposure for brands that deserve their flowers. Last weekend, Walmart turned up the volume on its megaphone, using its own interactive Shoutout activations at the festival to shine a spotlight on Black ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

The Shoutout greeted guests as soon as they entered Audi Field with a design bar on the counter, offering festival-goers the opportunity to design t-shirts featuring artwork by Black artists Chindo Nkenke-Smith and Ceej Vega, who also collaborated on the artwork on the walls, which includes shoutouts to brand founders such as Melissa Butler of The Lip Bar, Denise Woodard of Partake Foods and Shontay Lundy of Black Girl Sunscreen.

However, since you can’t praise a brand without actually trying the product, attendees were given samples of products sold at Walmart throughout the day to test and use on the spot. These included Black Girl Sunscreen Broad Spectrum Kids Lotion, The Shop Face Wash and Face Lotion, and a KAZMALEJE Kurls Plus Wide Tooth Pick Hair Comb.

Walmart Black & Unlimited: Shoutout Tour will continue throughout the fall to spread the message so everyone can discover the selection of Black-owned brands and experience their favorite Black businesses and creators. Because this tour has reached hundreds of thousands of people, this exposure will continue to increase discoverability and the impactful cycle of word-of-mouth marketing, further broadcasting the megaphone and allowing Black businesses to grow and thrive. In other words, Walmart is not in the gatekeeping business this summer. Now pass it on.

For more details on tour stops, see exclamation.