Since opening in May, The AUX, a Black-owned wellness hub dedicated to racial equity has faced challenges of visibility and awareness from the community.
Tucked inside an alley entrance at 2223 Washington St., the 16,500 square-feet building now houses about a dozen Black-owned businesses and health services such as a laundromat cafe, a dance and workout studio, a Black-owned bookstore and therapy services.
Over the past several months, The Aux hub and all the tenants have seen a “steady but slow growth,” according to Tiffini Holmes, co-founder and owner of the Aux Wellness Collective, a space in the building dedicated to mental and physical health services.
Despite this growth in some of the businesses, like the Laundry Café and the space’s newest addition, Zora’s Place, a bookstore dedicated to Black writers, other services have struggled to be seen, Holmes said.
Holmes said tenants located in the Wellness Collective space, like the dance classes and massage services, have had small attendance numbers so far.
“It’s definitely our plan to market more in different ways,” Holmes said. “I think so far we’ve been relying on social media as much as we can but now we have a newsletter.”
Additionally, founders of The AUX want to work with other groups to create new marketing opportunities such as holding events, Holmes said.
The Aux co-developers, from left: Sgt. Jacqui White, Tiffini Holmes, Lori Laser and Sgt. Tosha Wilson. Credit: Heidi Randhava
Jocelyn Davis, a dance and meditation instructor in the space, says her class attendance ranges from 3 to 7 students per class, although specialized classes for events or private parties generally have higher attendance.
“In terms of consistency of students, the challenge mostly is the location and people not knowing where we are or who we are,” Davis said. “It’s always been a work in progress, even though we do have Instagram posts and Facebook posts for marketing, it’s still just not enough.”
Since joining as a tenant in May, Davis has reduced the number of classes she teaches from five to two or three. However, as a previous business owner of the downtown Evanston studio, Akemi Fitness Method, she is aware that the first few years of a business are always the hardest to promote.
“It really wasn’t until my third year that I started seeing a consistent flow of folks coming in,” Davis said of her former business. “We haven’t even touched our first year yet, and that’s what I keep explaining to Tiffini. It does take time and a lot of boots on the ground work and networking.”
For the future of her classes, Davis said she is interested in continuing to promote private group sessions, as she saw more success over the past year when her classes were booked by large parties.
A workout class held at The Aux Wellness Collective over the summer. Credit: My Ly
Even for the Laundry Café, Jacqui White, a co-owner of the business, said the cafe and drop off laundry service are much less utilized than the self-service laundry space located near the entrance of the building.
“We look at it as three separate businesses,” White said. “The self-serve is doing awesome and the drop off and fold has picked up a bit and so has the cafe. I think they’re all doing good, it’s just the self-service is doing a lot better.”
White said in the new year she wants to focus on more marketing projects for those less used businesses, and to promote the health services located in the back of the building.
“So [when] people may come in for us, they’ll hear about the other businesses in the building,” White said. “That was our idea with the design, to have this cross pollination where they come in for one thing and find out about another.”
The newest tenant, Zora’s Place, joined the space in September as one of the only Black female-owned bookstores in Evanston and has seen steady interest over the past few months, according to L’Oreal Thompson Payton, the owner of the store and a yoga instructor at The AUX.
Not only does the store sell books, it hosts multiple story time sessions every month for children along with speaking engagements with authors. In the coming year, Thompson Payton said they plan to expand these events to include open mic nights, writing workshops and book clubs.
Thompson Payton added that December marked the store’s busiest month so far, with multiple events held in the space, including a Kwanzaa story-time event and the store being included in the inaugural Chicagoland Bookstore Holiday Trolley.
“It feels like people are slowly but surely starting to hear about us,” she said. “We’re a little bit off the beaten path, so I like to think of us as Evanston’s hidden gem but hopefully it won’t be hidden for much longer.”
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