I love birthdays. Like, I really love birthdays. Life is so precious and I believe that it should be celebrated whenever possible. Now more than ever, I believe we should cherish the beauty of life. That's why I say it with my chest, birthdays still matter in 2020. This year, I wanted to do something fun, fresh and realistic considering all the things happening in the world. Then, the universe showed up like the boss she is and presented an opportunity I could not refuse. I got word that a local creative was starting a new venture – a luxury picnic experience.
Charlie B created Curated Luxe & Co with the intention of bringing luxury and good company together. The Denver-based company specializes in luxury pop-up picnics and other curated events, providing the perfect setting for any date night, birthday or celebration. Charlie told xoNecole, "When the pandemic hit, the whole world had to pause. Which included any celebrations, graduations, etc. We all had to figure out a way to pivot and navigate this new reality. Curated Luxe & Co created a new way to celebrate and keep everyone safe with intimate, elevated experiences."
For my birthday, I invited six of my closest friends to Colorado for a getaway in the mountains. Our fun-filled weekend had everything from bottomless brunch to horseback riding. I decided to end the weekend with a luxury picnic set in City Park, one of Denver's most scenic destinations. During quarantine, I have found that public recreational activities are a godsend because you can socially distance outside your home and actually do something fun.
Photography by Curated by Charlie Photography
The moment I knew that the luxury picnic was happening, I knew I had to find a gorgeous getup. City Park was about to get all of the black girl magic, OK! I fell in love with this African printed gown by Chimzi Fashion, so I added it to the cart instantly. I then asked my girls to coordinate with my frock because... I was born extra. Because they love me, they agreed.
Curated Luxe & Co coordinated all the things for me. All I had to do was show up.
Photography by Curated by Charlie Photography
Chef Lakiery curated a special menu for my celebration made up of mint watermelon lime fruit salad, cajun chicken salad, and turkey sandwiches. We also sipped on some Trulys like the sophista-ratchet divas we are. It was a good time!
Photography by Curated by Charlie Photography
The setup was my favorite part. It was so eclectic and chic. Curated Luxe & Co creates a mini destination getaway anywhere. Whether in your backyard or at a park, they bring the destination to you with different themes and setups. The company prides itself on cultivating one of kind intimate experiences that you can't find anywhere else.
"Black women deserve to experience and celebrate in luxury. It is important for me as a black woman to provide that," Charlie explained. "We work so hard as black girls in school, in our jobs, as mothers, as business owners etc that most times we forget to treat ourselves."
Photography by Curated by Charlie Photography
My tribe and I sat in the park in our best lewks playing games like For The Culture, Blebrity and Black Card Revoked. It was so black and so magical and I loved every minute of it. If you're looking for an inventive way to celebrate your born day, try a luxury picnic.
It was undoubtedly a perfect reflection of how I wanted to walk into 31.
Featured image by Joce Blake for xoNecole / Photography by Curated by Charlie Photography
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
Courtesy
“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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