When it comes to helping Black-owned and women-owned brands find their voice, she’s got the juice

While Kerrian Johnson was in her part-time MBA program at Northeastern University (she’ll graduate in 2025), she would occasionally come across an ad that caught her eye. She would text a link to her friend, Kyra Marshall, and the two would send a flurry of messages back and forth—all of them ideas for improving upon the campaign.

“We would be texting, DMing, just constantly going back and forth, messaging along the lines of, ‘If I were doing this project, this is how I would’ve done it,’ or, ‘I don’t know why they made this choice or that choice,” Johnson says. “We just always talked about starting something ourselves, but we never thought it could be our jobs.”

Life, as it does, intervened.

A couple years ago, another of Johnson’s friends, an artist in Los Angeles, called up Johnson to get her perspective on his own project. He needed help refining his personal brand and connecting to an audience, and asked Johnson if she would consider joining the meetings with his team.

Johnson pulled in Marshall, who is based in California, and they started creating some branding materials and a pitch deck for him.

“And then I just said to Kyra, ‘I think we could really do this, if we wanted to. I know we’ve talked about it playfully, but I think we could start our own business,’” Johnson says.

She and Marshall saw how Black-owned and women-owned businesses rarely got the support they needed, and found a gap in the market they could fill—it was a mission that had particular resonance for Johnson, who is a first-generation Guyanese-American woman.

So, the friends kept their ears to the ground, seeking out other nascent brands or businesses that they could get behind and support with their marketing and creative prowess. Essentially, that’s how Fruit Juice Studio, Johnson and Marshall’s creative design firm, was formed.

Today, they have half a dozen regular clients and offer services in four major buckets: creative direction, brand design, brand strategy, and overall consultation.

As they grow their business and narrow their focus, they are looking for Black-owned and women-owned businesses to support in particular, Johnson says.

“We know these are not the entrepreneurs who are getting the most support, and so it’s important to us to figure out how to resource these business owners,” she says.

It’s true: According to a Pew Research Center study, only three percent of businesses in the U.S. were Black-owned in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available. What’s more, those businesses accounted for only about 1 percent of gross revenue that year.

“We saw so clearly that there was a need in our community for this kind of work, and so it was important to us to fill it in the ways that we can,” Johnson says.

Johnson was recognized among this year’s Women Who Empower Innovator Award winners. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. Johnson took third place among graduate student award winners.

Throughout this venture, Johnson has continued her graduate program, and both she and Marshall work outside of Fruit Juice Studio. It’s a delicate balancing act, one that Johnson navigates with her friend, and with her faith.

“I have seen Kerrian’s faith as integral to her ventures,” says Alyssa Tocchi, a pastor at Antioch Community Church in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, and someone whom Johnson describes as a faith mentor.

“A venture like this takes a lot of patience, endurance, and humility,” Tocchi says. “Kerrian has invited God into the ideas, conversations, relationships, and creative processes of Fruit Juice Studio, and continues to give God the glory for any and all success that she and Kyra had—and will have.”

Eventually, Johnson plans to evolve Fruit Juice Studio into a full creative design studio, and a place where she has the freedom to do creative directing full-time. “I see myself as a creative strategist and a creative communicator,” she says. “Those are the areas where I feel like I’m not racking my brain or working against the way that my brain operates to do these things.”

And just as importantly, she wants to be a role model for other young girls—girls like she once was.

“I love creating. And I never thought I would be able to create as a job,” Johnson says. “When you’re a little Black girl, a child of immigrants, a job in creating is just unheard of. You might create on the side, you can sketch here and there, but that being your full-time gig was never something that I dreamed about, because I didn’t think that I could dream about that. And that’s one of my hopes: that through Fruit Juice and through my career, there are little Black girls out there somewhere that think, ‘Whoa, that’s a job that I can have.’”