A marketing brief usually asks someone to change their mind. Kelli JOY Richardson helped take on a brief that required changing the rules. The subject was Black hair: the braids, locs, twists and natural textures that could become grounds for exclusion at school or work. A beauty brand was involved. So were lawmakers. The eventual deliverable included legislation, which is rather more difficult to mislay than a campaign slogan.
Richardson, founder and CEO of The House of JOY, came to that work with a career spent inside large companies and behind public occasions. She had worked at Procter & Gamble, built a marketing organization at BET and led global consumer advertising work at Dell. She knew the machinery that gets an idea in front of people. With the CROWN movement, she helped assemble people who could carry an idea into public policy.
The distinction matters to her story. Advertising offers any number of ways to celebrate a person’s appearance. The harder question is what happens when that person arrives at a job interview on Monday. Richardson’s work on CROWN connected the image in the campaign with the treatment of the person outside it.
A name with an assignment attached
JOY is her name before it is her company’s name. Her father named her Kelli Joy and later told a friend that he wanted her to create joy for herself and other people. After his death in 2012, she reconsidered the work she wanted to do. The agency, founded in 2013 and previously called JOY Collective, gave that family intention a business address.
There is something pleasingly demanding about naming a company after a feeling. A quarterly report can account for revenue quite neatly. Joy requires a little more explanation. Richardson’s answer has taken the form of work for brands and institutions, with attention to the communities those organizations want to reach. The name sets an expectation about the effect of the work, as well as its commercial purpose.
She grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and graduated from Howard University with a degree in economics. Her education also included executive study in negotiation at Harvard Law School and a Betsy Magness fellowship through the Center for Creative Leadership. The combination is practical: understand the incentives, understand the people and learn how to bring them to an agreement.
At Howard, her activities included leadership in Delta Sigma Theta and founding Young Democrats. Public participation belongs early in this account, before the agency and the awards. So does a less solemn allegiance: she is a Cleveland Browns fan. Anyone looking for evidence that she can remain attached to a long project may wish to start there.
Before the coalition, a team of one
Her early career at P&G involved packaged soap and mass fragrance brands. These were established consumer businesses, where an idea had to work amid questions of positioning, research and sales. Later came Dell’s consumer division, where she led global advertising and innovation. Across those roles, she worked with familiar products on the considerable task of making people care about them.
BET supplied a different kind of scale. Richardson started its comprehensive marketing organization with a team of one and developed it into seven divisions. The remit extended across promotion, communications, creative work, events, research, publishing and public affairs. It is an unusually concrete way to describe an executive’s contribution: the work grew from one person’s responsibility into an organization.
Marketing, communications, creative services, special events, research, publishing and public affairs.
The BET Awards, Hip Hop Awards, Celebration of Gospel, Spring Bling and BET Honors were among the events whose marketing, publicity and event work she led. Viewers meet a show when the lights come up. A marketing executive has already spent a great deal of time with the audience before that moment, helping establish why the occasion deserves an evening of their lives.
Her experience across consumer goods, technology and entertainment helps explain the range of her later agency work. A brand has a business problem; an audience has its own interests. Working between the two requires more than knowing the appropriate reference or booking a recognizable face. Richardson had spent years building the teams and programs that connect those competing demands.
Who needs to be in the room?
The CROWN movement brought another demand into that equation: protection against race-based hair discrimination. Dove, the National Urban League, Color Of Change and the Western Center on Law & Poverty were its founding coalition organizations. Richardson and her colleagues worked on behalf of Dove and the coalition, drawing together marketing, advocacy and legislative expertise.
Her contribution was especially social in the literal sense. She used her network to help bring the team together. Esi Eggleston Bracey provided executive leadership behind Dove’s involvement. Orlena Nwokah Blanchard shaped marketing and communications strategy. Adjoa B. Asamoah led legislative strategy. These were distinct jobs, and the distinction is part of the achievement. A campaign seeking legal change needs people who know how legal change happens.
Richardson has described an innovative career moment as asking how hair discrimination could end, then calling a Black lawyer to discuss a legislative approach. The sequence is revealing. Start with the outcome. Find the expertise required. A person experienced in communications can be particularly useful when she knows which part of the answer belongs to somebody else.
California’s first CROWN Act was signed in July 2019, with Senator Holly Mitchell leading the legislation. New York and New Jersey followed that year. The acronym expands to Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair. It gives a broad principle a memorable name, while the legislative work supplies the protections the name promises.
Richardson also took the argument into public testimony. In Montgomery County in 2019, she wrote as an agency founder, a resident and the mother of two Black sons. She wanted children and adults to be able to wear their hair without risking exclusion. Her concern was personal and specific: the rules governing an ordinary school day or working day.
The work between the milestones
Later testimony in Connecticut and Maine shows the persistence behind the public celebrations. There were coalition partners to identify, research findings to explain and lawmakers to address. Geography kept changing. The central problem stayed recognizable. One victory created a precedent and a reason to keep working elsewhere; it did not complete the assignment.
That is a useful corrective to the way campaign success is often pictured. The photograph records the signature. The work also lives in written testimony, introductions and repeated explanations. Richardson’s career gives those less photogenic activities their due. A relationship established years earlier can matter when a new question requires someone prepared to help answer it.
The industry noticed. The Dove/CROWN work received Global SABRE recognition in 2020, and Richardson’s agency appeared on the 2022 Inc. 5000 at number 2,907. In 2023, her honors included ADCOLOR’s Rockstar Award and PRWeek Purpose Awards’ CEO of the Year. The business had built a record that could be read in industry recognition as well as legislative milestones.
Her professional relationships have remained visible beyond individual campaigns. At the 2023 Matrix Awards, she presented Esi Eggleston Bracey’s honor. That same year, she joined the Fearless Voices event in Cannes alongside speakers including Rashida Jones and Cara Lewis. These occasions place her in the wider conversation about who leads communications and whose experiences the industry takes seriously.
Back to Cuyahoga County
In October 2025, Cuyahoga County Council passed its CROWN Act legislation, authored by Councilman Michael J. Houser Sr. For Richardson, the location gave an ongoing national effort a particular intimacy. This was her home county. The campaign she had helped build now touched the place associated with her own beginnings.
“I’m thrilled to have the freedom to finally wear my natural hair how I choose”
Kelli JOY Richardson, October 2025
She went on to name workplaces, conference rooms and boardrooms. It is a precise list for someone whose career has passed through all three. The freedom at issue belongs in the room where a person is assessed, hired or heard. Her enthusiasm makes sense against that working life, with its years spent helping organizations decide how they present themselves.
Today, The House of JOY describes a practice led directly by Richardson and senior colleagues, bringing in established collaborators when a project calls for more capacity. Its work includes strategy, content, partnerships and experiences. The underlying proposition rests on access to people and understanding accumulated over a career. In this business, a useful contact is someone who will actually take the call.
The girl from Shaker Heights, the Howard economics graduate, the executive building BET’s marketing operation and the founder supporting legislation in her home county belong to the same story. Richardson has spent a career considering how people are addressed and represented. CROWN added an enduring question about how they are treated. For a company carrying her middle name, that is a serious way of keeping a family promise.