Source: S2S Magazine

Your friends have been telling you that you’re bougie (derived from bourgeois), but you deny it. You simply have distinctive tastes and enjoy nice things, and there’s nothing wrong with that. That doesn’t make you bougie, does it? When you think bougie, you think of Toni Childs on Girlfriends or Hilary Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But it’s more to it than these TV characters who were poster children for sadity-ness. Don’t think you’re bourgie? Well, check out these 7 signs to see if you actually are.

(Crain’s) — Ibrahima and Fatima Doukoure started Bebenoir in 2004. At the time, he worked as an account representative at Mediterranean Shipping Co., and she was in advertising sales at Nielsen. The salaries and benefits were welcome, but Mr. Doukoure had always longed to start his own fashion line. At friends’ urging, the couple decided to follow that dream.  Their first product was a brown T-shirt with the message “Born In Africa” written across the front. The two kept their corporate jobs and spent weekends “driving around and begging people to buy the shirts,” Ms. Doukoure says.

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(Atlanta Journal Constitution) – -Two important but seemingly unrelated events happened in Carol Held’s life the week of Sept. 15, 2008: She opened a retail store in Atlanta’s burgeoning Westside area, and the global stock market tanked. Held knew EcoEmporium, a local source for all things organic from mattresses to baby clothes to BPA-free water bottles, was a good concept; what she hadn’t anticipated was the economic downturn.

Held and her husband, Bruce, used personal savings to launch the store with the goal of breaking even in 12 months and turning a profit by year three. But last summer, as weeks and weekends passed, sometimes without a single customer visiting the 3,200-square-foot space on Marietta Street, the next move was clear. In March, Held announced the store would be closing.

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