Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Sevilla and Ashleigh Boyd.
Lauren and Ashleigh, please share your story with us.
At first, Sphynx Teahouse was just a joke between Ashleigh and I. We laughed about maybe we’ll turn into cat ladies, except we’d be super dope and run some sort of hip-hop cat cafe. But after a few months of tough times in our personal lives and especially after Ashleigh lost her home Hurricane Harvey, I thought again about this hypothetical hip hop cafe. At the time, I was working a desk job and called Ashleigh saying something like, “Hey girl… remember that joke we made about cats? Well, will you just joke about it with me for a little longer, because I think we might have a lil’ something, something.”
I had previous experience in helping another person build their business, and now it was time to apply it to my dream with Ashleigh. What we did know was that we wanted to build our business differently, to use our cafe to address our communities’ challenges. As Black & Latina business owners, that pride and love in our communities inform everything we do. So from the get go, we knew we wanted that to go beyond the concept of just the menu. Yes, we wanted to use vegan Soul Food-Mexican fusion to feed and nourish our customers in a familiar way — to give them healthier versions of the food we grew up with like pozole or collard greens. But, we also wanted to help businesses like us improve too. That’s why we partner and buy from Black & LatinX – owned businesses. We love our relationships with Inclusive Randomness and Shirts to Go and our ingredient providers at Plant if Forward, Houston Sauce Co., Nu Waters Co Op and Panaderia Tierra Caliente.
This way, when Sphynx is successful, all of our partners are successful — and vice versa. We grow together and empower each other. It’s a cooperative effort to improve our communities.
To be where we are now, as a business that has only been serving for two and a half months, we have been blown away by the support and mentorship we’ve received, especially from the part of Houston we most want to serve: Third Ward. Ashleigh lived in Third Ward while she attended UH for the first part of her undergrad, and when we were deciding on locations for the future brick and mortar, this was the first place we both chose for Sphynx Teahouse’s home base. Even before the cafe, we had close connections to the Project Row Houses with our friends Marc Furi and Brian Ellison showing there, and as vegans, we were always all up in Crumbville and Doshi House for their bomb cookies and tonics.
We love our pop ups and although its tough at times, we’re passionate about what we’re doing and who we’re doing it for. Every time we kill it out there, we’re getting closer to setting up a for-real-for-real cat cafe and that much closer to really being able to make a great contribution to Houston. It’s funny sometimes. Maybe it started as a joke, but it’s still the end goal for us: the hip-hop cat cafe for the people and animals of The Ward, a place for families and for college students, a place where people can eat food like their granny or abuelitos make while still being healthy. A cafe that reflects our communities and celebrates our cultures and to get to share that with the city we love so much. That’s the dream, right there.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
We’ve had difficulties, sure. Neither Ashleigh or I am from families with a lot of dough, so we’re taking a big risk. But outside of obvious things like money, I think it’s been a challenge to prove ourselves to family and friends how serious we are about what we’re doing, and overcoming a lot of stereotypes– on multiple fronts– about why our business WILL work in Third Ward.
Some family and friends were skeptical about whether our concept would work in our chosen neighborhood. Questions like: “Are you sure it’s safe for two women to be selling things out in Third Ward?” “Are they even gonna want your vegan food?” and “Why the hell would Third Ward want a cat cafe?” were the most asked of us.
These were basically just bigoted questions asking: “Do ya’ll little ladies really think you can handle running a business?” and “Do you really think a black neighborhood is gonna go for your weird vegan rabbit food?”
First, as for overcoming stereotypes about Third Ward being “unsafe” for female business owners, look at the scoreboard! We’re inspired by Nzingah Gross at Inclusive Randomness, Chasitie Lindsay “DJ Reel Chill” with Houston Sauce Company, Nikita Hodge at Tre Chic, Ella Russell at Crumbville… should we go on? So HELL YES: Third Ward isn’t just “safe enough for a woman” to run her business, it’s one of THE places where a woman can KILL IT in her industry. Ashleigh and I are just following in their foot steps, working hard early mornings and late nights to give our customers the best product. Although we can’t know everything about running a business (and we don’t believe anyone truly does) we know that we are not afraid of challenges and that we believe in our concept enough to triumph over what comes our way.
The second issue, however, comes from a long-standing stereotype about Houston’s Third Ward being a crime-ridden, undesirable community that needs a developer to come through and “fix” it to make it “suitable for business.” Supposedly-concerned friends and family claim to worry about us being in “a place like that.” But Ashleigh and I see beauty and bravery in this neighborhood that people who buy into stereotypes grossly ignore. Are they seeing the powerful and moving installations at Project Row? Are they checking out the beautiful, unique fashion at Tre Chic? Are they seeing the way vegetarian joints like Doshi House or Green Seed fill up with customers or how Houston Sauce Co. is blowing out crowds with their vegan pop ups?
If you actually walk around experience the neighborhood for yourself, the stereotypes about Houston’s Third Ward fall away. You can feel the spirit, resilience, and creativity of what is basically Houston’s Harlem. You can witness the leadership and the activism of the EEDC and Sankofa Institute. You can walk to the TSU campus or drive ten minutes to UH, our city’s renowned universities. You can see an active, engaged community working every day to preserve its history of Black art, education, and entrepreneurship from gentrification.
When Ashleigh & I see this, there’s not a damn place we would rather be. When you have an understanding and a love for the culture of a community, you want to help the people of that community– meet their needs, listen to their wants. And through its actions, it’s clear that Third Ward wants a place for its family and large student populations to gather their organizations, to hang out with loved ones, see/experience artists and yes — eat and drink well! Third Ward deserves a place that is not going to try to change the culture of the neighborhood, but a place that’s going to CELEBRATE that culture. So, will our conscious, community-minded cafe concept work? We believe it. And so far, our recent events with the EEDC and Freemarket Square are helping us to get closer to achieving that.
Please tell us about Sphynx Teahouse.
We are founded by two women of color: I, Lauren Sevilla, am Chicana (Mexican American) from Houston and my business partner and best friend, Ashleigh Boyd, is Black with Jamaican heritage from New York. We’re the only food stand in Houston, possibly in Texas, serving Soul Food-Mexican fusion and 100% vegan at that! We’re here to bring ya’ll the best recipes from our grannies, aunties, abuelitas, tias and find ways to combine them in unique ways without losing the authenticity of their origins. Our main draw is our fusion tortas and unique tea blends. But hey, there are definitely times where our soups like gumbo or pozole steal the show!
We’re most proud of our ability to break through people’s preconceptions about many aspects of our business. We’re constantly proving that you don’t have to sacrifice your cultural identity just to go vegan — you can have delicious foods from your childhood without harming your health! We’re showing that women of color can handle the heat of the kitchen and endure the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship as well as anyone else. And finally, we’re proving that business can be more about just making a buck off of selling a few menu items: you can build a business designed that benefits and celebrates a community and helps fellow minority business owners to grow, too!
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Honestly, if we had to start over, we wouldn’t have done anything differently. Every challenge has been an opportunity to learn, and waiting until a concept has reached perfection before acting on it just delays the beginning of your company’s story!
Contact Info:
- Website: sphynxhouston.com
- Email: sphynxhouston@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sphynxhouston/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sphynxhouston/?ref=page_internal
Image Credit:
Morgan Mbadugha, Ahzjah Laiel
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