Desiree Noisette started Mermosa Wines in 2017 in St. Petersburg, Florida, but moved her family to Oregon in 2022, drawn by the state’s outdoor scene and to be closer to her company’s winemaker near Salem.
In the months since the move, she turned often to an app called XB, launched last year by two Portland brothers to connect users to Black businesses and culture in the Portland area.
Noisette, who is Black, used the app or the Facebook group that inspired it to find help with business licensing in Oregon; ask questions about real estate; find decorators and other professionals to help with events; staff Mermosa PDX, the restaurant she opened in Northwest Portland last year; and recently to hire accountant.
“XB has been a welcoming community and a way for me to meet the Black community here,” Noisette said. “It’s just been an incredible support system, not only from a promotional standpoint but also from getting people to actively engage with us.”
XB’s had its beginnings in 2015, when Adrian Wright created a Facebook group called Black Portland as a way to “reconnect the community.”
He said he grew up in a historically Black neighborhood in Northeast Portland. He watched as the neighborhood languished in the 1980s, when banks refused to issue mortgages in much of the city’s inner North and Northeast, which served to encourage crime and reduce homeownership.
Then, as the city began to pressure lenders and invest in the neighborhood, home prices soared and young homeowners began to steadily displace longtime residents.
He saw the area, once the heart of the Black community, transform.
“Displaced residents relocated eastward, while newcomers, often employed by major corporations, gravitated westward,” Wright said. “This geographical dispersion fractured the once tight-knit bonds we shared.”
Wright founded Black Portland group on Facebook to foster dialogue on “Black empowerment, support for Black-owned enterprises, and the quest for authentic connections among individuals who resemble us.”
The group grew to 13,000 members, roughly 8,500 of them active. Wright said it became a place for Black Portlanders to find support and meet new people. He said many, especially those new to the area, would go to the page seeking recommendations for a barbershop, hair salon, Black-owned restaurants or healthcare providers.
But sometimes posts and threads about upcoming events or business recommendations get buried, Wright said.
“Even if you follow a page, even if you’re a part of a group … you’re at the mercy of Facebook’s algorithm to decide what you see,” he said.
That’s when his brother, Ronnie Wright, suggested they turn the Facebook group into an app that would serve as a helpful resource for locals, newcomers and out-of-town visitors who were always asking for suggestions. Wright, who works as a footwear designer, said creating the app allowed him to combine his passion for design and technology.
“We wanted to take the utility of that online community and put it somewhere useful,” Ronnie Wright said, “where people can easily find all this information in one place.”
That became XB, an app focused on Black-owned businesses and events. It also includes interviews and features on Black entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals and other locals.
XB, Adrian Wright said, refers to the amplification of Black culture, where “X” refers to the multiplication sign and “B” stands for “Black.”
The app, Adrian Wright said, is geared toward Black residents who are trying to seek connection to their culture but struggle to find it in metropolitan areas that lack diversity, like Portland. (They hope to expand to other cities in the future.)
But he added XB is for anyone who wants to support Black-owned businesses and learn about events they might not have learned about through their usual social channels.
The app is available for 99 cents in the Apple or Google app stores or at xbcommunity.com.
Adrian Wright said the idea is not new — there are similar apps already out in the market. But what sets XB apart from those apps, he said, is that XB was designed and developed by Portlanders who have deep ties to the city’s Black community.
Businesses can apply to be added to XB’s directory for free, and Adrian Wright said there are more than 300 vetted Black-owned businesses already featured on the app.
The question remains how to make the resource self-sustaining.
For now, they said, XB is a passion project that the brothers are “taking money out of our own pockets to run,” Adrian Wright said. It could become a subscription service, and the brothers are still debating whether to charge businesses, organizations and event promoters.
“Portland serves as our testing ground, allowing us to establish proof of concept,” Adrian Wright said.
He said other revenue streams include advertising opportunities on the platform and possibly integrating a payment platform or point system for businesses to use as a rewards system.
“Everyone benefits,” Ronnie Wright said. “When you support the Black community, you support every community.”
–Kristine de Leon; kdeleon@oregonian.com