Bruni Amorim is a trans woman from Rio Pomba, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais (Brazil), who has worked in the hair and beauty field for 13 years. After finishing her Fashion Design studies, she started working at a friend’s salon but soon after, the friend left.
At the same time Bruni went through a very violent divorce, marked by physical and financial abuse. She lost many possessions, was robbed, her ex-partner incurred debts in her name and vandalized her apartment. Her father, a great supporter of her career, helped her cover the cost of repairing the apartment and overcome this difficult time: “He kept me alive.” Bruni started therapy, began to recover, and found the courage to start her own business.
At this turning point, self-employment was simply a means of survival. Despite having plenty of professional qualifications, self-esteem issues and infrastructure challenges prevented Bruni from aiming higher. Therapy gradually helped her with her health and self-care: she returned to running, had a more enjoyable life, and continued investing in her beauty salon. Even so, she could not see herself as an entrepreneur; she had no understanding of her revenue or profit, let alone her potential.
Micro Rainbow Brazil
While Bruni felt “discomfort about her own image,” she received information about MRIF’s 9th entrepreneurship training through a friend. In the second selection stage, she remembered an important lesson from her father about the need to be more visible and put herself out there, so she gathered the courage to send her presentation video, which got the attention of our team, and she was selected.
Bruni began to refine her vision to become the businesswoman she is today. The management knowledge acquired from this training was unprecedented in her journey and fundamental to organizing her business. Before the training, she had no business background. One of her biggest difficulties was with finances: she didn’t want to systematically control her spending, fearing that this would take away the pleasure of living, which had been so difficult to regain. Gradually, she began to understand that financial control was not synonymous with deprivation. Bruni says with a nostalgic and emotional voice that the friendships formed in this cohort were a highlight of the course.
After Micro Rainbow’s 9th training, Bruni joined the Pride project, carried out by Diversità Consultoria, which consolidated her knowledge about business management to the extent that she won a seed capital award for the excellence of the Canvas Model she presented.
Bruni was dealing with tendinitis caused by the long hours she worked and she needed new services in her studio to continue expanding. With the seed capital, she created a space for manicure and pedicure services, strategic additions to any beauty salon, in addition to investing in other improvements and new products.
New LGBTQI+ Business Acceleration
Bruni joined Micro Rainbow’s new LGBTQI+ Business Acceleration programme which she says “shook up all the structures of my business,” bringing innovative sales and positioning strategies on Instagram and taught her how to attract more customers. Her commitment and consistency in classes and mentoring resulted in a significant increase in revenue for her business in just two months: “Professor Sol’s classes inserted my professional Instagram into a sales perspective, not just to obtain more likes. I aligned everything I learned with the person responsible for my company’s marketing, and with just one well-directed video, I sold five procedures, whereas before the course, I could only sell a maximum of one.” She sums up the training as a space for “teachings, care, affection, and family.” Bruni is truly part of the Micro Rainbow Brazil family, and her life and business trajectory inspires our work and that of so many trans people who see in her the right to love, smile, run on sunny mornings, and work, without giving up who they are
