By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 30, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Most people who leave JP Morgan end up at another bank, a hedge fund, or something in fintech. Especially in this economy, where people are looking for something safe and adjacent (if that even exists anymore).
Brooke Sharpton left to start a furniture company, and the industry she was walking into had no idea what was coming.
She was at a trade show when a manufacturer looked her up and down and said it. “Oh my gosh, I don’t have time to talk to the help. Can you just finish cleaning up over here.” Sharpton was not the help. She was a VP at JP Morgan who had spent twelve years managing millions for ultra-high-net-worth clients, and she was standing there as a potential customer.
Almond Wind, her Miami-based luxury furniture brand, is what came out the other side. She designed it herself, funded it herself, and built it without a single outside investor or a day of industry experience. She’s on track to bring in $500,000 by her first July anniversary. And by year two, she expects to cross seven figures.
“In that ultra-high-net-worth space, you start to realize that a lot of your clients are founders and business owners,” she says of her years at JP Morgan. “I already kind of have this sense of I’m never going to be a client or I’m never going to be able to amass this kind of wealth if I stay in this corporate structure.” The sofa idea started forming not long after that realization.
It came in 2020, when she bought a house and went looking for something tosrc="https://media.essence.com/vxcjywbwpa/uploads/2026/04/Photo-Apr-17-2025-8-11-45-PM-scaled.jpg" alt="Brooke Sharpton Quit A Six-Figure Finance Career To Build The Furniture Brand Black Women Actually Deserve" width="400" height="266" />
The first $40,000 went on a credit card. She was still at JP Morgan when she did it, still showing up to the office every day while going back and forth with overseas manufacturers on the side. She paid three or four thousand dollars just to ship a single sofa from overseas to see if it was worth ordering. She has an eight-year-old daughter at home, which meant flying out to see pieces in person wasn’t always an option. The financial risk was absolutely there and she knew it, but she was a woman on a mission. She had savings to cover the credit card if everything fell apart, and if the sofas sold, she would get her money back. For someone who had spent twelve years calculating risk for other people, she was remarkably calm about her own.
Then one afternoon in May of last year, a notification came through at her desk. She had just sold a five-seater ottoman for $5,500 through a company most people didn’t know existed yet. “I was so excited. I was like, oh my gosh, I can do this if I shift my focus.” She quit in July, made a TikTok account she had never used before, and posted a video saying she had walked away from JP Morgan to start a furniture company.
It blew up. Within weeks she was shipping sofas to people across the country who had never touched the fabric, never sat in one of her pieces, never walked into a showroom.
“I’m so grateful that I never had that doubt of, oh my, what did I do? Did I mess up? Why did I quit? Because literally right out of the gate, I was already moving sofas and making a profit.”
She has been approached by investors more than once and keeps saying no. “I’d really have to have my backup against the wall,” to hand over equity, she says. She would rather take a loan first and exhaust every other option before letting someone else’s timeline near the brand. She says she hasn’t even fully executed the vision yet, and she knows exactly where it’s going.
The name, Almond Wind, is a feeling more than an explanation. She describes it as lightness, like coming home to something that was actually made for you. She built it around five signature colors drawn from the warm, deep tones of West African interiors, the kind of luxury that actually exists in Nigeria and Ghana, expressed through texture and intention rather than print. Every shoot includes West African art and sculpture in the frame because the cultural context is the whole point. She wanted every customer to feel like the person who made their sofa actually knew them. “I want to have a piece of furniture that feels like home, that feels intentional, that I know was made by someone who would have me over for a glass of wine.” That extends to everything around the sofa, not just the sofa itself. “If you’re not seeing yourself being represented in that, then I don’t think that you’re rooted in culture.”
Sharpton is building in a market where Black consumers already spend roughly $20 billion. The industry has spent years collecting that money while largely ignoring the people spending it. Sharpton isn’t asking for a seat at that table. She’s building her own.
“If you really want to do something, you absolutely can. And the people who you do look up to, they’re no different than you.”
The post Brooke Sharpton Quit A Six-Figure Finance Career To Build The Furniture Brand Black Women Actually Deserve appeared first on Essence.