OWN’s “Heart & Hustle: Houston” is in its second season, and cameras follow six Black women as they navigate ambition, family, and friendship in one of the country’s most competitive cities. But for cast members Alaina Saulsberry and LeBrina Jackson, what airs each Saturday night is only a fraction of the story.
Saulsberry, founder and CEO of beauty brand Color du Jour, and Jackson, owner of Cypress-based Escape Spa, spoke with the Defender to discuss what the show captures, and what it leaves out, about actually building a business in Houston. Both women say the daily reality of running a business looks far different than what an episode can capture.
For Saulsberry, watching herself on screen for the first time last season was surreal.
“I look so normal, as there is so much on my mind,” she said. “It just kind of reminded me of my family. What is going on, whether it’s my love life or with my kids or with my family, it does push me more as a working woman, as an entrepreneur.”
Her path to Color du Jour started decades before reality television. Raised in a family that never left the house without makeup on, Saulsberry did her friends’ makeup in high school bathrooms before picture day and worked for free in college. She spent four years as a seventh-grade science teacher before launching her makeup career professionally in 2008. She’s now been in the industry for 18 years.
That teaching background still runs the business. Saulsberry hosts themed, four-hour makeup classes for Houston women, and has learned to retool her offerings as trends shift, from a mascara-and-moscato theme years ago to whatever resonates now. She also spent a decade running a studio built around more mainstream makeup techniques before pivoting to a softer, editorial style that better matched Houston’s glam-heavy taste, a shift she credits to word of mouth and staying close to the community.
Funding remains one of the harder realities she navigates as a Black woman entrepreneur, she said, which is why she prioritizes women’s empowerment events that connect business owners to grants.
“It’s hard to get certain funding for our businesses,” she said. “It’s important to go to those women’s empowerment events, especially if they’re talking about grants and talking about funding that will help us.”
Day to day, she said, looks less like glamour and more like faith and improvisation, working out each morning to manage the stress of “where’s our next dollar coming from,” answering emails on the fly, and currently serving as her own assistant while she scales back during a leaner economic stretch.
She’s also leaning on AI tools to help map out business strategy as she rebuilds her team. That balancing act is unfolding as Saulsberry and her husband, Josh, navigate a divorce this season, a storyline that plays out on screen even as she keeps the business moving.
Jackson’s instincts, meanwhile, took root long before the show did.
“I’ve been around entrepreneurs my entire life,” she said. “I come from a lineage of nothing but entrepreneurs.”
She opened Escape Spa in 2022 to give guests something more than a spa day, what she calls “the full intention of wellness versus the leisure of it.” Running it now means staying largely out of her team’s way, she said, trusting the systems and chain of command she’s built rather than inserting herself into daily operations.
“I work hard to make them the best that they could possibly be, to not need me in their way,” she said.
Jackson has spent this season navigating a shifting dynamic within the cast after being labeled a “mean girl” by some castmates. The split between what’s real and what’s television matters to her.
“You will never get the best self on camera, because that’s when you shouldn’t be your best self, that’s performance,” she said. “When I’m a representation of the entity, it’s more or less the consistency as a human being that’s impactful.”
She said she signed on for the show mainly for the visibility it gives her business, not the drama.
“I move with my gut when it comes to entrepreneurship. I think that has allowed me to be extremely successful.”
Alaina Saulsberry, Founder and CEO of Color du Jour
“That’s all I always cared about, that’s the only reason why I chose to do the show,” she said. “The hustle part, it means a lot to be noticed on that level, a national level.”
The hustle doesn’t stop when the cameras do. With her husband now a business partner, deals and decisions happen anywhere, “at lunch, in the grocery store,” she said, a constant rhythm she credits with shaping who she is on and off screen.
She hopes viewers take away a fuller picture of what it takes to build something lasting in Houston, beyond the conflict reality television is built to sell.
“Heart & Hustle: Houston” airs new episodes on Friday at 8 p.m. ET/PT on OWN.
