Who is OBWS?

OBWS started as a purposeful social media account to promote awareness and uplift black-owned businesses.

Official Black Wall Street, aka OBWS, is a next-generation digital platform helping to recirculate the Black dollar, empower Black entrepreneurs and strengthen the local economy in Black communities. OBWS, a two-sided e-commerce platform, offers a web and mobile application that allows people worldwide to find relevant black-owned businesses, products, and services.

The Challenge

OBWS approached Sidebench with a goal to transform how people discovered and shopped with black-owned businesses. Despite a rapidly growing social media presence and an existing website, they struggled to expand on opportunities to leverage these into a sustainable business model.

The Goal

Major economic and sociocultural barriers stemming from racial discrimination in the United States have linked directly to a lack of awareness and disproportionate support for local, black-owned businesses. On top of a systemic challenge, OBWS found themselves committed to wanting to improve the overall experience of their product and business directory service in an effort to make the process of discovering and advertising much easier.

The Solution

The Sidebench team worked with OBWS to design and re-build their digital identity. This consisted of re-creating a scalable and automated web platform that accommodated both business owners and consumers. With an already staggering reach on social media, we ensured the web experience seamlessly interpreted to a captivating mobile experience.

By working to re-develop the OBWS app for iOS and Android, this opened an additional stream of revenue for their mobile-first audience, broadening their market coverage and eliminating further obstacles to simplifying the process from discovery to listing.