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Local Leaders: Launching a Business with Muscle, Hustle, and Honor

When Psyche Terry founded UI Global Brands, she had a very clear mission in mind. “I wanted to be able to provide everyone with personal care products that would be clean, but also will be affordable and accessible.
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Courtesy of Psyche Terry

When Psyche Terry founded UI Global Brands, she had a very clear mission in mind. “I wanted to be able to provide everyone with personal care products that would be clean, but also will be affordable and accessible. It's our mission to be in every store, everywhere, and for every person.” 

UI Global Brands is a global manufacturer and nationwide marketer of consumer, personal care products under its keystone brand, Urban Hydration. It’s not Terry’s first successful business venture. She designed her own label of intimate apparel and was the first-ever designer to offer a G-cup sized bra, which was sold in Walmart, along with its first insertion of different shades of brown bras for women of color. Later, she pioneered the very first fashion plus-size lingerie brand for JCPenney and Macy’s.

In conjunction with UI Global Brands, Terry also leads a global partnership with WATERisLIFE, which helps areas around the world who are stricken with water scarcity. Most recently, the partnership funded a well in Kenya that helped provide 300 students access to clean water. Terry also had the opportunity to join with Oprah Winfrey to raise money to feed the homeless in North Texas.

“I’m a big fan of muscle and hustle,” she says. “Also honor.” She defines success as having an idea, taking note of who likes it, whether others will buy in, and whether it’s sellable. “If you can’t convince your BFF, your partner or spouse to buy in, you might want to start reworking the trimmings.” 

When she came up with her idea for UI Global Brands, she not only got her husband to buy in, but her friends. The business grew from there.

“I love products,” she says. “I love clean beauty. Clean hair products, clean eating products. Anything and everything that touches my body, I want it to be clean and healthy.” She also wants it to be affordable for her and her family of five. Clean products, she believes, should be available to anyone and everyone. 

Highlights from Psyche Terry’s interview include:

  • Surviving a Pandemic: We are in a dance. In order to dance, you’ve got to pivot. If your partner turns, if you don’t turn, you fall. Our turn was hand sanitizers. … I reached out to current customers and was honest with them. Here’s what I’m doing, I’m at home with three kids, I do retail well, I do skincare well. Here’s what I do, what do you need? … What is it that your customer needs? For me, it’s walking through my customers’ needs, not necessarily what I want my customer to need.
  • Trusting Yourself: I love the premise of ‘believe in yourself,’ but even more for me, it’s trusting in myself. Sometimes I’m my only support. The fact that I support my own ideas allows me to pitch it...the fact that I’m not willing to back down, I’m fierce, I’m in control of that thought of ‘this is why it works. Here are the facts of why it works, the numbers of why we need it. If you believe in yourself not only mentally but factually by going through numbers and proving out your case.  
  • Be Kind: I call it honor; we call it Terry honor or urban hydration honor. it just means be kind, be thoughtful, be considerate to your customers because when you’re kind and considerate I feel it pays back dividends, where we go from 500 stores it 5,000, 10,000, 15,000--all of that was built out of me was being fierce, not giving up, continuing to believe but also being kind and being responsive, considerate, and honorable not just to customers but to competitors.