Jacksonville business bridges gap in retail representation for African-American children

Jacksonville-based business, Blended Designs, has gained national recognition for its firm stance of representation in youth retail, more specifically, creating products that reflect children of color.

Blended Designs said fewer than 2 percent of character backpacks in the market reflect children of color.

“I found 670 character bags and only 14 had children of color,” Blended Designs’ Chief Executive Office Casey Kelley said. “So that let me know that we would be filling a huge void and that there was a market out there.”

Kelley said the idea started when her son asked for a backpack with his face on it. When she went to shop for backpacks that feature African-American children, she said she saw a gap in the market.

Action News Jax found 44 percent of students enrolled in Duval County Public Schools are African-American, which equals more than 56,000 students.

She said these backpacks represent all of those students locally.

“When these students have that sense of empowerment that it really changes their whole mindset,” Kelley said. “We always say if you change the image you’ll change the narrative.”

Kelley created the line 1954 in honor of Brown versus Board of Education. The line is made up of backpacks, duffle bags, lunch boxes, pencil bags, and is currently working to expand their products.

“That desegregated school and in a sense, we’re desegregating the back to school category,” she said.

The first product was a backpack with a character of her son, Carter.

She has since made other backpacks featuring her daughters, nieces, nephews, friend’s children, artists, and in the process of the tenth design that will feature her other son in college.

She said she wanted a diversity in characters to represent all African-American children.

“We wanted it to have a variety of different shades. She’s very light, the darker skin and we wanted everyone to be adequately represented,” Kelley said.

The first backpack was sold in 2017 and has since been distributed worldwide.

“We thought we’d sell 1,000 backpacks. We ended up doing a quarter of a million dollars in July and August of 2017,” Kelley said.

She said she is hoping to expand the line with other types of products and has hopes to collaborate with history museums.

Cox Media Group