February 2026 Amber Grant Awarded to Brown Girl Surf

Video Transcript

Marcia: Hello, everyone, out there in our WomensNet community. Welcome to a chat with our February 2026 Amber grant winner. Today, I’m speaking with Farhana Huq of Brown Girl Surf. The Amber grant is for all women business owners in the U.S. and Canada.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner. I’m just one of our advisory board members here at WomensNet, and every other month, I get to learn more about our grant winners, which I just love. Thank you for being here today and for being willing to chat with me about your company.

So, let’s start at the beginning. Farhana, how about telling everyone about how Brown Girl Surf got started.

Farhana: Well, Brown Girl Surf, the platform, started in 2011, and we received an Amber Grant for $500 in 2012 to start. But it was just to elevate the voices of diverse female surfers around the world, and that was done. There are now so many more women, girls, and nonbinary folks getting into the sport.

As a surfer myself, I was traveling a lot to different places to surf and ended up getting locked down in Morocco for 19 months, and I had the opportunity to surf while I was locked down, luckily. And I remember looking in the mirror and one day noticing my hair was just totally bleached. I had splotches on my cheeks, and I couldn’t find hydrating care for my skin or my hair. Most of the options I had were made of plastic, had crappy ingredients, and I didn’t know the supply chain or where they were coming from.

So, I got back to California and started just working on solutions. I had a friend who was an incredible soap maker. She had all these misfit pieces. I literally took her pieces, upcycled them in recycled packing, put them in a basket, and started selling them at the surfer parking lots. Then I started making a shampoo bar by hand, and added that to the basket. And within nine months, I had nine retail placements with six stores reordering. Yeah, that’s literally how it happened.

And I just finished formulating a skin cream made with shea butter called Nilotica, which is sourced from a women’s cooperative in Uganda. So, I’m really trying to create an ethical supply chain. And that’s how the skin and beauty brand under Brown Girl Surf got started.

Marcia: That’s amazing. And thank you for mentioning the Amber Grant from way back when. For those who don’t know, the organization has been around for a long time, and it originally started with $500 grants. So, that’s amazing that you’re back 15 years later.

Farhana: Yeah, it’s amazing to be back. So, thank you so much.

Marcia: Now, let’s talk a little bit about some of the resources that you found and relied on as you were getting started. Is there one that has been especially helpful to you?

Farhana: Yes, I found a climate fellowship called Terra.do, and climate was one of the things that was really important to me personally to design my next steps in business and really make sure the choices I was making were sustainable for the world. The fellowship was a couple of months long, and through it, I learned the science of climate change, mitigation, and adaptation, and I also got connected with an incredible network of climate-minded folks.

One of the things that spun out of that fellowship was a mending circle that my local friends from the fellowship started, and we got together, and we would mend our clothes. And it was in that circle that I would bring my shampoo bars. Every mending circle, I would bring a batch and give them out to people and be like, “Can you try this, please, and give me feedback?” So, the circle gave practical feedback but also a broader lens from which to approach business and design, and think about sustainability more as a core mission to how we do business.

Marcia: So, you created your own focus group. Very smart.

Farhana: Inadvertently. Yeah, inadvertently.

Marcia: But that’s great that you found one resource, and you even tapped into it for feedback.

So now let’s talk about marketing. Is there a marketing strategy that you have found especially helpful to really help you grow your business quickly?

Farhana: Storytelling. As a founder, I’m literally the one with the basket of goods that I’ve sold in surfer parking lots, brought it to the mending circle, brought it to my hairdresser, brought it just wherever I can go. I brought it into stores. And I tell the origin story of Brown Girl Surf, and then I talk about upcycling the first bath bars. We call them Misfit Bath Bars for my surf buddies in Monterey that handcraft them, and then they use the proceeds to fund girls and women surf programs.

People love the story and the continuity. And then I share the story with the face cream of not being able to find one that hydrates and trying all the organic brands, all the European brands, like the department store Clinique, Estée Lauder, you know, all this stuff that creates things that you don’t even know what’s in them. And I think just telling that story at markets wherever I go, then it draws people in, and then they are really like, “Oh, wow, this is a person that’s really trying to create a solution to an issue I have or I can relate to.” So, that has been the number one marketing strategy.

Marcia: I think you’re smart to carry your products with you since it is something tangible and you always have some on hand.

So, let’s wrap up with a quick question about what the WomensNet community of fellow women business owners can do to support your company. If there was one thing that you might ask them to do, what would that be?

Farhana: Follow us on Instagram: Brown Girl Surf. I’d love for you to follow the journey.

And then the second thing is we’re definitely looking for an amazing web developer, someone who can just sort of help take our website to the next level. So, if you have any people in your network you recommend, that would be great. Thank you.

Marcia: And how should they make contact with you?

Farhana: They can just email info@browngirlsurf.co.

Marcia: Excellent. Thank you and congratulations again on being our Amber grant winner for February.