By Haley Wilson
The Birmingham Situations
Birmingham shop owner Tunya Humphrey has just one intention: “Make ladies come to feel fairly.”
“The bulk of my lifestyle has been dedicated to splendor and supplying the area and prospect for girls to embrace their complete femininity,” she mentioned.
Developing up, Humphrey viewed her mother, Mary, work a beauty salon. Minor did she know that her mom was forging a path towards the opening of Sweetie Couture, a life style outfits brand name at Mercantile on Morris, a combined-use business and household improvement on Birmingham’s Morris Avenue.
The boutique provides moral, ecofriendly items—apparel, household goods, natural beauty and wellness products—that Humphrey selects from nearby and world-wide independent brands and women-owned companies.
“Sweetie Couture was curated for present day women who enjoy to incorporate unconventional things into every single facet of their lives—the way they costume, the way they design their households, even down to their natural beauty and wellness routines,” mentioned the boutique’s proprietor and operator. “I think consumers can create their individual ideal versions of them selves.”
Expanding Up
Humphrey, 39, grew up in Mulga, Alabama, a modest mining town in unincorporated Jefferson County.
“Home existence was absolutely wonderful,” she mentioned. “It’s a quite nostalgic spot in which every person appreciates every person. Most of the men and women in the group are loved ones. Even my church [Shady Grove Missionary Baptist Church] is in Mulga, ideal all-around the corner from my household. [The city] just screams family.”
Humphrey is youngest of three sisters (Anquintta and Carmanita are her more mature siblings), and residents in the tiny city arrived to know the trio as “The Humphrey Women.”
“That title form of trapped with us,” she explained. “We had been generally together, so folks in a natural way just gave us that name.”
Humphrey cherished to engage in gown up when she was more youthful.
“I would get in difficulties from time to time since I would alter dresses so quite a few times throughout the day,” she mentioned. “My mother would be like, ‘Wait a 2nd. … How lots of periods are you heading to transform?’
“I normally informed [my mother] I was intrigued in understanding to sew, and she was an individual who generally pushed my [sisters and I] to do what we ended up intrigued in. … She would do all she could to assure that we experienced some official coaching that would place us on a route for what we in the long run wished to do.”
In the mid-1980s, Humphrey’s mother opened the Hair Dashery splendor salon, wherever Humphrey would aid out when attending Slight Superior Faculty.
“I really feel like my mom was one of the first African American salon owners in Homewood. I never actually know if which is real, but that is what it felt like,” reported Humphrey. “I grew up in the salon. [It was] a very good atmosphere that centered all around natural beauty. There are men and women I achieved when I was growing up who nevertheless try to remember me. … To this day, my mom however services customers she had when she to start with opened.”
An Eye for Design
Soon after graduating from high school in 2000, Humphrey enrolled at the University of Alabama (UA), wherever she examined style retail.
“I’ve normally regarded what I wanted to do,” she claimed. “I began in clothing layout and then altered my major to style retail the next semester. [My time at UA] was totally great. I uncovered about so several facets of the trend business and the historical past of trend. … I figured out that you can include so several various types into one to make one thing really unique. I have generally liked each and every element of it.”
In 2004, her senior calendar year, Humphrey interned at Banana Republic in Atlanta, Georgia.
“I worked along with the visible design team,” she claimed. “Moving to a new town, a greater city outside the house of Mulga, was surely an knowledge. … Going on my possess as a senior in college, no mom, no father, keeping genuine to what I was taught morals-smart and work ethic-smart enabled me to have a pretty prosperous internship. … I really felt like I transformed into an actual adult at that place in time.”
Right after graduating, Humphrey moved to Birmingham in 2005.
“You know how when you get out of faculty you imagine, ‘Oh gosh! I have this diploma. I’m heading to definitely do exactly what I want to do.’ … From time to time that is really not the case,” she explained. “At that point, I was doing work a sequence of jobs in the hotel and hospitality marketplace and [felt that] I had to do anything in my subject. I’m a workaholic and I like to do a wide variety of factors, … so staying tied to a 9-to-5 job was just not my detail.”
Investigate and Improvement
In 2007, Humphrey opened her own lash enterprise: Lash N Sprint. “It is kind of a spinoff of the Hair Dashery,” she claimed of the Homewood-primarily based shop. “I truly started out servicing customers in my mom’s salon, although I was executing an apprenticeship for cosmetology, so it sort of evolved into its very own point.”
The following yr, Humphrey resolved to go back to college. She enrolled at Strayer University, where by she pursued a Grasp of Business enterprise Administration degree.
“After getting that leap of faith with starting off my have lash small business, I commenced to visualize what I genuinely needed to do, which was start my personal outfits line. So, I decided that going to school for business would plant a seed that could grow into that eyesight,” she reported.
Sweetie Couture
Humphrey’s initial life style manufacturer plan, Sweetie Couture, was created in 2007.
“It began out as me just producing a garments line,” she stated. “I felt like I would match additional into a creative director purpose, so I started out performing some coming up with and figuring out what I needed the assortment to seem like.”
At the time, the mom of two was pregnant with her 1st boy or girl, Zakiyah.
“I was truly form of stepping into motherhood at that point, so the notion kind of acquired set on the back again burner. … I would choose it up, place it down, choose it up, put it down, and factors like that. I never actually obtained a probability to get [the business] off the floor the way I wished to.”
Humphrey put in a “few many years dabbling” as a freelance showroom designer, a area coordinator for a merchandising business, and a graphic designer.
“My sister works as a graphic designer, and that is sort of where by I realized all the things there is to know about graphic design,” she claimed. “Eventually, I figured out how to use [graphic design software] from a innovative standpoint and figured that I could develop my own visible component of nearly anything, regardless of whether it is a retailer design or planning a T-shirt. … That was a person of the issues that aided me drive myself in that arena.
“I started performing investigation on my have and imagined, ‘What do I will need to do?’ I begun mapping out a approach of how to include all this stuff into the best occupation for me.”
In November, Humphrey opened her boutique at Mercantile on Morris. “When you assume about Sweetie Couture, it is about times,” she reported. “We love to generate moments, regardless of whether it’s what we wore that day and how that trickles in excess of into how you enhance your dwelling and even down to wellbeing, attractiveness, and wellness. … I actually want to make ladies search rather each working day.”
Sweetie Couture is located at 2212 Morris Ave. Suite 107, Birmingham, AL 35203. For extra information and facts, pay a visit to www.instagram.com/thesweetiecouture/ and www.thesweetiecouture.com.