JW: Disney called us. We had no intentions of doing an actual location. We thought we were just a retail business. And as far as scaling, we had moved to corporate gifting. So we also did that. We did not think that this was something that was on our path, but when they came to us then they asked, we said, ‘Let’s look into this.’ We really did it for fun. We thought, ‘Can we pull this off? Can we really do it?’ And in fact, our first call is most interesting.

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First of all, we didn’t even believe it was really Disney. But when we talked to them, we were like, ‘Did you realize that Post-21 is these two people right here on the phone call with you? ‘Like we’re the whole operation right now.’ So from the time they called to the time we actually moved onto the resort, it was about a year, a little less than a year. The goal was to be open by Christmas. And that was only two months before the November holiday. The shutdown from the coronavirus pandemic happened in the middle of our planning to open.

We had been planning for you know a couple of years before that to be a story and we’d always plan to open on June 1st because of Black Wall Street. But it just so happened that was the day when a lot of other things happened. So it wasn’t just the pandemic, but it was also the fight for social justice. And that was like the first day of the conversation transitioning to, ‘We need to do something about this.’ And supporting black-owned businesses is the way to do it. So having us was kind of just a one way to do it.

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