Powerful Women Series: Bozoma Saint John

Introducing Powerful Women

There is a particular kind of woman who does not wait for the room to be ready for her. She walks in, assesses what is there, and builds what is not. She has usually been underestimated. She has rarely been surprised by it. She has learned, through accumulation of evidence, that the credentials required of her are different from those required of others, and she has met that standard anyway, and then exceeded it, and kept going.

The Powerful Women series in House Magazine was created for her. These are profiles of women whose careers, choices, and ways of moving through the world carry something worth understanding. The Sandra woman notices them. She has been one of them, or is becoming one. She does not need them explained to her. She needs them seen.

We begin with Bozoma Saint John. The choice was not difficult.

Bozoma Saint John

She was the first Black C-suite executive at Netflix. The first-ever Chief Brand Officer at Uber. Head of Global Consumer Marketing at Apple Music. Forbes named her the most influential CMO in the world in 2021. Harvard Business School published a case study on her career titled "Leading with Authenticity and Urgency." She taught a program there called "The Anatomy of a Badass."

The resume is extraordinary. It is also, in Bozoma Saint John's own accounting, not the most interesting thing about her.

She was born in Middletown, Connecticut, to Ghanaian parents who had made untold sacrifices to reach the United States. Her childhood moved between Accra, Nairobi, and Washington D.C. before her family settled in Colorado Springs when she was twelve. She has described the arrival as a shock in every sense: a mostly white, conservative community that did not quite know what to make of her and was not particularly interested in finding out. She learned early that being nimble and exceptional was not optional.

She began her career at Spike Lee's advertising agency in New York, working as a receptionist until she spotted Spike carrying a script for Bamboozled and offered to provide notes on it. She worked her way up. From there: PepsiCo, where she oversaw music and entertainment marketing and helped orchestrate Beyonce's Super Bowl halftime show. Then Beats by Dre, which was acquired by Apple three months after she joined, which is how she ended up reintroducing Apple Music to the world with a performance that became, briefly, the most-talked-about thing in technology.

The urgency

In 2013, her husband Peter Saint John was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. He died months later at forty-four. They had a daughter, Lael. They had been separated and planning to divorce. When his diagnosis came, they reconciled. She has described Peter giving her a short list of things to do before he died: cancel the divorce. Fix the wrongs immediately.

Her memoir, The Urgent Life, published in 2023 by Viking Books, is the account of what that loss did and did not break in her. It is a book about grief and about Ghana and about what it costs to be the first in rooms that were not built with you in mind. It is also, unexpectedly, a book about what it means to live at full capacity because you understand, viscerally, that time is not guaranteed.

The urgency she describes is not ambition in the conventional sense. It is grief, converted into forward motion. It is the specific knowledge that waiting for permission is a luxury she does not have and never did.

The Ghana connection

What the resume does not immediately surface, but what matters to the conversation Chéri House is interested in having, is this: Bozoma Saint John served as Ambassador to the African Diaspora and Special Envoy to the President of Ghana. In that role, she authored the marketing strategy for The Year of Return, a national campaign that invited members of the African diaspora to return to Ghana four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans arrived in America. It is one of the most significant diaspora cultural campaigns of the last decade, and a pilgrimage that Mo, Chéri House Founder, experienced personally in 2019. It was in Ghana that Chéri House designs were coming to life, being tested in nature. Bozoma Saint John built this campaign which provided us an opportunity of a lifetime to come “home” as a collective and experience an abundance of love and inspiration that is Ghana.

Mo, wearing early iterations of the Sandra Monokini in Accra, Ghana.

Her company, Eve by Boz, a hair care and extensions brand she founded after leaving Netflix, sources and manufactures in Ghana. Its formulations use baobab oil, moringa, shea butter, and palm kernel oil. The brand's stated mission is the empowerment of Black women and women of color through products that celebrate rather than approximate their natural beauty.

The thread is consistent. Wherever Bozoma Saint John has gone, she has carried Ghana with her, not as heritage to be acknowledged at appropriate moments, but as an active framework for how she builds and what she builds toward.

The meeting

Chéri House met Bozoma Saint John at an event to promote black owned brands at the New York Stock Exchange. She was warm and gracious in the way that only women who are genuinely secure tend to be: present, unhurried, with none of the performance of accessibility that substitutes for the real thing. The Sandra Monokini was gifted to her that evening, selected with intention: a suit designed in New York, manufactured in Brazil by a women-owned factory, inspired by five destinations that include the West African coastline from which the Cape Coast colorway takes its name.

Bozoma was so kind to have provided an autograph in a personal copy of “The Urgent Life”, a book that walked with us in very trying times while still in Investment Banking. Meeting a woman like Bozoma was a dream and we hope she knows how much of an inspiration she has been to women everywhere.

Mo and Bozoma Together at the NYSE event

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