As the founder of the statewide entrepreneurial support network Her Texas, Jasmin Brand has more on her professional plate than most. The award-winning marketer and social entrepreneur recently met with D CEO for lunch at Hudson House, where we embraced the dining faux pas of ordering the same dish; the Cajun chicken did not disappoint.
Brand tells me her drive and love of a good challenge started early. As a young girl, she begged her dad to let her go to school early and always enjoyed shopping for school supplies more than clothes. She was a dancer at Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts before graduating from Southern Methodist University and has launched and led several businesses, from creative agencies and digital publishers to interactive events and media companies. Her two most recent endeavors balance her passions for growing businesses, marketing, and building community.
The first is a company she founded called Her Texas. As Brand’s network of business contacts grew, she was inspired to take a more systematic approach to connecting women founders. “I built a large network of women who were investing, creating, and developing, and I was manually connecting people, but my inbox was a hot mess,” she says. “We can’t be relying on Jasmin and my slow email responses, so I started doing some research and found that there’s not a good statewide network for women. We’re very siloed in cities, so I created something that gets us talking together.”
Since then, Brand has pulled together a group of 20,000 women entrepreneurs and supporters in Texas, aiming to more than triple that number to help facilitate strategic support and increase connectivity, business flow, commerce, and investment in the state. Brand has spent years developing entrepreneurial and financial relationships all over the state, and wants Her Texas to be a place where capital sources, especially women investors, can connect for deal flow and opportunities. Her Texas launches its statewide membership in June.
Brand had always been a Dallas girl, and hadn’t explored many of the suburbs, but as she learned more about the robust growth and opportunities in the bustling city of Frisco, she became more open to putting her skills to use there. She began a new role with the Frisco Economic Development Corp. in March 2022, seeing it as an opportunity to dive deep into a dynamic, growing city, hoping to foster a culture of innovation. She no longer works for Frisco’s EDC, but saw the impact of her identity as a Black woman on those in her network during her time with the city. “When I came on board, I got so many emails from women of color and founders of color looking for representation,” she says. “Having the role there makes people feel that their perspective will be finally represented.”
When she isn’t uniting women founders and attracting businesses to one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, Brand serves as an executive board member of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences at SMU. In all of her roles, Brand is a connector, and she says she always will be.
Brand has high hopes for changing the narrative for Texas women in business. “Once we have an integrated ecosystem, as opposed to being separate, we will not only be creating new businesses but also a support network,” she says.
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