I Didn’t Find a Niche. I Lived It First.
There is a version of this story where I am simply the strategist.
The one who got the call, assessed the brand, identified the niche, and built the framework. Clean and professional.
That version is true.
It's just not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that Velvet Butch found me before I found it.
Q and I had talked about it for years — as a concept, as a vision, as one of those ideas that lives in the space between people who see something the market doesn't yet and aren't quite ready to say it out loud. I knew what it was. I knew who it was for.
I just hadn't admitted yet that it was also for me.
Then her wife D called. Asked if I could help make it real.
I said yes the way you say yes to something you didn't know you'd been waiting for.
And then I sat with what I'd agreed to and felt something shift.
Velvet Butch is a beautifully nuanced term.
It embodies the essence of a masculine-presenting woman who embraces her softness, emotional depth, and feminine sensibilities. It reflects a powerful balance of strength and tenderness, with masculinity expressed outwardly and an inward devotion to the nurturing, intuitive, and graceful nature of womanhood.
It is, at its core, about two things happening simultaneously and harmoniously:
Presentation to the world.
Showing up for yourself internally.
When I wrote that definition the first time, I meant every word. Brand strategy wasn’t part of the conversation.
I thought about every morning I'd gotten dressed and made a thousand small decisions about which parts of myself were safe to bring into the room.
I thought about the years I'd moved through professional spaces with a certain authority, sharp, direct, commanding, while carrying something softer and more certain underneath that most rooms never got to see.
I thought about being a Black woman whose masculinity was sometimes read as aggression, whose femininity was sometimes read as weakness, and whose wholeness was almost never read at all.
I wasn't defining the niche.
I was standing inside it
This is what nobody tells you about identity-driven strategy:
The strategist who has lived the identity she builds for doesn't just have better instincts.
She has a different kind of access entirely.
Not access to data. Not access to trend reports or focus groups or consumer insight decks.
Access to the feeling. Moving through a world that was not built with you in mind. Showing up every day, and still doing the sacred work of being true to yourself.
That feeling is not a soft credential.
It is the sharpest strategic tool in the room.
I founded The Curated Misfits at 50.
But if I'm being honest, it didn't start that way.
I had incorporated the business years ago for building websites and light marketing dealing with a few friends and sometimes their friends. Nothing grand. Nothing declared.
Then life happened, and it almost took me out. I had to do something to survive, so I took control and chose to live fully. I refused to keep doing this work and living at half capacity, walking into rooms that wanted my output but not my orientation, my thinking but not my truth.
That's when TCM became what it was always supposed to be. Built on a single conviction:
Identity is not a demographic checkbox.
It is architecture.
The brands that endure aren't the ones with the broadest reach. They're the ones with the most precise mirror, the ones that hold a specific person so completely and accurately that she looks at them and says finally.
Not oh, that's nice.
Finally.
That finally is a homecoming. And homecomings are only possible when someone builds the home with full knowledge of who is coming through the door.
Velvet Butch is being built for the masc-centered woman who has never once stopped being feminine.
Interesting enough Velvet Butch was launched at Q’s 50th Birthday party. Q saw our dichotomy of being masculine presenting with our very feminine ways. Yes, I’m in touch with my feelings.
The woman who presents to the world with authority, edge, and a particular kind of grace that doesn't ask permission. Who shows up for herself internally with softness, depth, and the full knowledge of who she is.
She has always existed.
She has always known herself.
The market just kept asking her to be less of both.
I am that woman.
I know her morning routine. I know what she feels in a fitting room. I know the particular exhaustion of being whole in a world that keeps asking you to split yourself in half and the particular freedom of finally, fully, refusing.
I didn't come to this brand as an outside expert.
I came as someone who had been waiting, without fully knowing it, for this mirror to exist.
Building the strategy for Velvet Butch didn't just clarify the brand.
It clarified me.
That is what happens when the niche is real.
It doesn't just find customers.
It finds the people who were waiting sometimes without even knowing they were waiting for someone to finally say the thing out loud.
Velvet Butch said it. Thank you, Q for thinking of me to bring this to life.
Building that brand made me say it for myself. No more excuses. No more bending to fit. I live out loud, rooted in who I am, every single day.
Anisa Kenyatta Parks is the founder of The Curated Misfits, an identity-driven marketing strategy firm built for founders who are done translating themselves for a market that was never built with them in mind.
