“THESE SHOES ARE GOING TO KILL ME,” Tracee Ellis Ross calls out to the

costume designer, as she holds up a pair of Pradas.

Ross and the crew are on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif., decid-

ing on outfits for the next episode of Black-ish, in which she plays

the lead. The fitting department is a cramped, cluttered space in one

of the soundstages, hemmed in by racks of clothes hung atop each

other, bunk-bed-style, almost up to the ceiling—silky blouses, flared

pants, dresses, heels, sneakers. (They snagged the Pradas on sale.)

Everywhere you look, boards are tacked up with photos of the cast

and set, scene breakdowns, press clippings, and sayings like “Behind

every successful woman is a tribe of other successful women who

have her back.”

Michelle Cole, the costume designer, has Ross’s back (and front).

Rainbow “Bow” Johnson, M.D., the actress’s character, rarely wears

the same thing twice—except for the shoes, because they’re usually

out of the shot. Still, Ross is down for the Pradas. “I feel I would

suffer for them,” she says.

“OK, and you’re able to walk?” Cole asks through the muffle of fabric.

“No,” says Ross. “I’m not able to walk in them. But I don’t really

seem to care.”

That answer, in a way, is the rallying cry of an entrepreneur: This

may not work—let’s do it anyway! It is also a good summary of

Ross’s approach to life. Over and over again, she has stepped out

without quite knowing how she’ll stay upright. Clearly, she’s done

it in her Golden Globe–winning entertainment career, where she’s

become known for a comic talent that curls and coils and pongs out

of bounds, not unlike her signature galaxy of gravity-defying hair.

But the same attitude has also led her to found and run a new

company. It’s called Pattern, and it’s a line of products that’s as much

about enhancing women’s natural, curly, coily, tight-textured hair as

it is about restyling the way the culture sees those women. “Figuring

out how to take an idea and pull it up into the atmosphere and into

the third dimension? There’s just no road map,” she says. “I really had

no idea how you turn a dream into goop. And I don’t mean Gwyneth

Paltrow Goop. I mean hair products. Like, how do you do that?”

It took her 10 years. She laughs. Because really, nobody starts out

knowing how to do that. You just put on the new shoes and walk.

WE DUCK INTO ROSS’S “RAINBOW” TRAILER. It must be 85 degrees in

here. She likes it hot. There’s a vague sagy-musky incense she can’t

identify, which is out of character for a woman who’s surgically

specific about what she likes and doesn’t. At 47—and she will tell

you her age within a minute of meeting you—Ross is riding high.

She’s busting out of her sitcom success, which took flight in 2000

on Girlfriends and continues into her sixth season of Black-ish, a

show that has gained critical acclaim for tackling issues like police

brutality and slavery. Later this year, she’ll costar in the film Covers

with Dakota Johnson and provide the lead character’s voice in the

animated series Jodie, an MTV Daria spin-off, which Ross is also

executive producing—part of venturing behind the camera to take a

bigger role in the storytelling. That includes creating and executive

producing the series Mixed-ish, a Black-ish prequel about Rainbow

as a young girl, which premiered last fall.

Like Bow, Ross has a white father, Robert Ellis Silberstein, and a

black mother, Diana Ross. And for those who don’t know, yes, that

Diana Ross, the icon. “I talk to my mom a lot,” she says. “I don’t know

what we talk about, but we talk a lot. If I call her at 5:30, she’s usually

up. She never not answers the phone for her kids.” No doubt, Ross had

quite a start. The middle sister of five siblings, she grew up between the

States and Europe, and went to college at Brown University, where she

discovered acting. Although she had all kinds of dreams, never did she

think of becoming an entrepreneur.

“I don’t know that I even knew the word or what it meant,” she

says. “But I feel like my childhood trained me to be a producer and

a CEO. My mom is not a woman who sat somewhere and people did

things. She is an extremely professional woman who has a sense of

agency in her own life and a real work ethic—along with making

dinner and waking us up for school and being glamorous, gorgeous,

joyful, fun. So it just gave me that example.”

Looking back, Ross realizes that her journey to entrepreneur-

ship started young—when she was a teenager doing R&D on her-

self. She’d quit using relaxers to chemically straighten her hair, but

she couldn’t find products for wearing it natural. “I literally started

buying everything,” she says, “to the point that my mother was like,

‘Listen here, little girl, your hair products alone are going to break

the bank. You need to get either a really good job or a really rich

husband if this is going to keep happening.’ ”

Like so many women with curly or tight-textured hair, she exper-

imented. Beer and Keri lotion worked, but not for long. Deep-con-

ditioning products seemed to help...somewhat. She constantly

tinkered in the shower and kept it up into adulthood.

By 2008, she was starring in the last season of Girlfriends and

still her own hair chemist. One day, she stopped at a beauty sup-

ply store on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A., and a guy came out of the

salon in the back. “You have no idea,” she remembers him saying,

34 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / March 2020

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