Black women and wellness have always had a complicated relationship.
Not because we don’t take it seriously, and not because we don’t have the time (well… we kind of don’t, but that’s not the point) but because the version being sold to us rarely accounts for the life we’re actually living. Scroll through #WellnessTok on any given day and you’ll see 5 a.m. workouts, perfectly calm morning routines where you dip your face in a bowl of ice water, green juice recipes, etc. But all of it looks a little different when you have two kids, a brand, and a TV show running simultaneously. Or so, I’ve heard.
It’s something Hannah Bronfman knows firsthand. The entrepreneur, HBFIT founder, and mom has spent years building a platform around wellness, but what does that look like right now? It’s not the weekly acupuncture she used to swear by. “Now I am lucky if I get into acupuncture once a month,” she says. And that perfectly curated home she had before kids? “Clutter piling up, loud moments in the house, toys everywhere,” she says.
“That’s just part of life with kids.”
The CEO Club on Amazon Prime has expanded her reach beyond the wellness world she built her name in. And what she’s doing with that platform is saying the things the wellness industry tends to skip. Like the fact that taking care of yourself as a Black woman often means taking time you technically don’t have. “Historically Black women take care of their entire village before taking care of themselves,” she says. She’s been living inside that sentence.
Motherhood pushed the whole conversation. These days self-care looks a lot more like boundaries than bath salts. “As a mom it’s important to have boundaries with my kids when it comes to taking time for myself. That could look like only reading them one book because I want to take a long shower and get to bed early, or take 5-10 minutes to myself before embarking on the bedtime routine so that I am more patient.”
She’s been using Mrs. Meyer’s since college, so when the brand launched a diffuser it wasn’t a hard sell for her to come on board as a partner. “The atmosphere in our home affects everyone’s mood, and scent is always my first step in resetting the mindset at home,” she says.
The scent changes depending on what she needs. She reaches for Rain Water while she’s working because it makes her feel refreshed. And then it’s lavender once the day is done. She builds the rest of the evening around it: the kitchen gets a once-over, she makes tea, puts something calming on in the background and does her skincare. “It turns the end of the day into an intentional reset instead of just another task,” she says. Small, but it’s every night.
She’s also particular about what she lets into a home she’s worked hard to make feel like her own, which is part of what drew her to the diffuser specifically. “I’m such a big fan of functional adds that don’t make me compromise on design,” she says. Business doesn’t bend to aesthetics the same way.
The CEO Club has been a different kind of education. She came up as talent, where being likable was part of the job description and accommodation was how you got hired again. Entrepreneurship doesn’t operate that way. It also meant unlearning something she had relied on for years: the instinct to prioritize being liked. “So much of doing business is psychological and I wish I had understood that earlier in my career,” she says. “In business, relationships are often more transactional and shaped by power dynamics, and understanding that changed the way I navigate them.”
“I feel like I look anything but polished but at least I am trying,” she says. “I think we are going to see a lot more moments of trying versus the perfect finished product.”
Building a wellness brand means the expectation is that you have it figured out. Bronfman has spent enough time in that lane to know how the game works. The aesthetic is still there, the brand is still intact. But she’s also the person telling you she hasn’t made it to acupuncture in a month and only read her kid one book last night. “Every night I need to switch my vibe from work to home and there are messy moments that happen then as well.” The diffuser helps. The five minutes help. And maybe so does just saying it.
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