Multicultural hair-care brand Cantu Beauty and networking coalition 25 Black Women In Beauty have announced the winners of their “beauty business accelerator,” joining forces to mentor the marketing efforts of three up-and-coming brands owned and operated by Black women.

Selected from a pool of more than 60 early participants, the three winners of the Cantu Elevate initiative are small business founders Arah Sims of peel-and-press nail brand Kyutee Nails; Alicia Scott of cosmetics line Range Beauty; and Tomi Alisha of organic hair company NaturAll Club.

As the chosen winners of the programs, the three women and their businesses will each benefit from a complimentary Cantu-sponsored advertising campaign valued at approximately $160,000, which will be delivered through the second quarter of 2021 in cooperation with New York-based media agency Reddish and the VaynerX-owned Sasha Group.

“You can’t teach passion,” says Cantu Beauty’s VP of global marketing Dametria Mustin, who also spearheaded the creation of the Cantu Elevate initiative.

Mustin, who first approached 25BWB about a potential venture in September 2020, says that creating the Cantu Elevate mentorship program involved a “pretty expedited plan of action” that began with large-scale workshops last November, which the three winners participated in.

“I tried to show how much of a proactive person I am” during last year’s workshops, says winner Arah Sims, whose direct-to-consumer “nail glam” brand Kyutee Nails is roughly six months old. But even in that short amount of time, she’s overseen the creation of a successful influencer-backed social campaign and has plans to streamline the company’s e-commerce portfolio.

“Her deliverables were outstanding,” Mustin says of Sims’ brand. “She didn’t just deliver the homework and documents … she went above and beyond and did a whole presentation.”

While Cantu Elevate isn’t the company’s first initiative to help up-and-coming female entrepreneurs, this is its first with 25BWB—a fruitful partnership that Cantu is aiming to continue well into the future.

“Obviously we’re going to do a lot of learning” during the impending mentorship collaborations, Mustin adds, but after Kyutee, Range and NaturAll’s respective marketing campaigns are rolled out in the coming months, “Our hope would be to continue the program later on this year. And then we want to go deeper within our communities as a whole.”