President Ronald Reagan signed the first major piece of legislation in American history protecting and establishing the ability for a woman to own a business in 1988, known as the “Women Business Ownership Act,” or House of Representatives Bill 5050. Before this, women were not allowed to take out business loans or credit in their own name as they were required to have a male co-signer to start the entrepreneurial process.
According to the “2024 Impact of Women-Owned Business” study from Wells Fargo, over 39% of total businesses in the United States are owned by women, generating over $2.9 trillion in revenue. Although women are often underrepresented within the entrepreneurial world, from coffee bars to bookstores, their impact is evident.
Melissa Saavedra and Sarah Mark, Florida Atlantic University alumnae, and Natalie Martinez, a South Florida native, are united in their struggles and successes as business leaders. They recently spoke to the University Press about these experiences as women business owners.
Sarah Mark, VI Coffee Bar
Sarah Mark, FAU business administration and management alumna, is a professional chef and owns VI Coffee Bar in Boca Raton, Fla. She explained that being a young woman in entrepreneurship hasn’t been easy.
“Being a woman business owner and just being young [comes with] a lot of people thinking you just don’t know what you are doing and that they can just take advantage of you,” Mark said.
After graduating from FAU in 2016, Mark moved back to her home state of New Jersey to work in restaurants, and shortly after, she moved to Austin, Texas, to continue to build her restaurant experience.
“I worked with some of the best chefs — I worked with famous chefs Gordon Ramsey and Jonathan Waxman. I also went to culinary school while I was there because my focus was to open a restaurant. I made sure that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, I was doing something towards that goal,” she said.
What started as a burning passion to open her own restaurant in 2023 became VI Coffee Bar. She explained that the idea for a coffee bar came from her drive to create an atmosphere for customers and provide them with more than just food and drinks. The name “VI,” six in Roman numerals, became an homage to her lucky number.
“It’s a community space for other people. And that’s all I wanted, to not only be able to express myself and bring joy to people but also create a space where people can enjoy themselves and gather as a community,” she said.
Being in the culinary space, Mark shared that having grit allowed her to overcome the hurdles typically associated with a restaurant business, including not being taken seriously and power imbalances. According to a study from Ohio State University, just under 60% of restaurants fail within their first year of opening. She shared that opening a food business takes a specific kind of person.
“You need to be hard-headed in a way and not let what other people say about you or to you affect you. With my specific personality and tenaciousness in the field, I knew that I could do it,” she said.
Melissa Saavedra, Steamy Lit Bookstore
Melissa Saavedra is the founder and owner of Steamy Lit, a romance bookstore with locations in Deerfield Beach and Tampa. The business started out as a romance and self-care subscription service in 2020, offering customers a quarterly shipment of personally curated romance books and sexual health products.
However, as her customer base expanded and her business model began to take off, in February of 2024, she opened her first brick-and-mortar store in Deerfield Beach.
“I never started with the goal to [create] what has turned into this very elaborate company,” Saavedra said. “I thought I just had a passion for reading romance.”
Having originally graduated from the University of Florida in 2019 with a sports management degree, Saavedra began her post-grad career in 2020 as a sports travel manager for San Diego State University.
However, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Saavedra noted that traveling was difficult, leading her to a passion for reading. She soon discovered a problem within the romance genre: a lack of representation and diversity.
As a Peruvian woman, Saavedra explained that it was difficult for her to feel represented by the romance genre. As most of the time, she notes some of the gaps found in the stories she read didn’t represent the experiences of the queer or Latinx communities.
“One was representation and diversity in general,” she said. “I felt that when I was walking into a Barnes and Noble, most of the stories that were jumping out at me were focused on white stories. And I wanted to read more books that represented me and the people around me.”
After seeing an outpour in support for her business from customers, Saavedra decided to open up her second Steamy Lit location in Tampa in December of 2024.
On Dec. 14, 2024, Saavedra received a letter from an anonymous sender stating: “Love is beautiful indeed, but thou can turn it into a cesspool of filth at your trashy bookstore!” Saavedra revealed that comments like these aren’t unknown to her, explaining that many don’t believe in her business.
“I don’t care to have the conversation of proving to you why this space [is here] because it is more than [about] reading romance; it’s providing a safe space for people, specifically women and people a part of marginalized identities, especially living in a state like Florida, where so many of our rights as women, as people of color, as queer people, are being taken away,” she said. “Romance bookstores are where you can feel safe, where you can see yourself reflected in it and have a happily ever after.”
Being a woman in an unconventional business space has not been easy for Saavedra. She explained that, sometimes, you just have to go with your gut.
“Shoot your shot. It doesn’t matter how wild it is. For every no you get, there’s going to be a yes that you thought you would get a no to — it’s going to work out in your favor, so just do it,” she said. “I think sometimes the fear of rejection gets in our own way.”
Natalie Martinez, Connect Record Store
Navigating often untraditional spaces is nothing new to Natalie Martinez, musician and owner of Connect Record Shop in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Martinez started her career at 14 playing music at different shows and events. By 17, she had played at Country Bluegrass Blues, a famous music club in New York City.
In South Florida, Martinez worked at Revolution Live, a rock music club in Ft. Lauderdale, selling show tickets. She would soon come across Radioactive Record Store, a longtime Ft. Lauderdale staple to the South Florida record industry, where she worked for over 15 years.
After 30 years of working for the company, Radioactive Records announced they would finally close their doors in Aug. 2024. Martinez explained that although the closure was heartbreaking, it finally allowed her to put her business idea to fruition. Alongside Mick Ford, another longtime employee of Radioactive, the idea for Connect Record Shop took off.
“We decided [to start from] a clean slate, and I decided to open my own place with Mick, but it was a very emotional time, watching that store close and everything that we had accomplished with them — pushing it aside was both very heartbreaking, but very empowering and motivating at the same time,” she said.
After opening Connect Records in November 2024, Martinez says that one of her biggest struggles has been being taken seriously as a business owner. In the record business, shop owners usually negotiate with other people for their collections, known as record buys. She explained that on these buys, people sometimes talk to her business partner instead of her.
“Unless it’s me that set the appointment, the moment I walk into someone else’s house [for a buy], they don’t look at me, they look at Mick — they start talking, and I’ll be like ‘Hi, I’m the one who set the appointment,’” she said. “It’s a two-way street, and at the end of the day, I’ve learned to pick and choose my battles. I’ve realized that as a woman, it’s just something that I have to do extra of.”
Martinez revealed that one of her favorite parts about owning Connect has been creating a diverse community, expressing that women have been historically underrepresented in the business-owning community.
“I feel like we have been underrepresented for a long time, and not just in music, in fashion, in travel, and I’m excited to see the rise of more women business owners and curators,” she said.
In facing doubt or skepticism from others for being a woman, Martinez shared that she has learned to accept and run with what people say.
“There are a lot of people that don’t take you seriously because ‘Oh, you’re emotional,’ or ‘Oh, you can’t be practical,’ or ‘You just do things differently,” she said. “What I say to that is, ‘Hell yeah, I’m emotional,’ and that’s why you’re going to get one hell of a cool business. I take all that stuff that everybody says, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I am all those things. I am a woman, and I’m proud of it.”’
This story is in the UP’s latest print issue Vol. 31, “Women in Paradise,” which can be found in the distribution boxes around the Boca Raton campus or in the Student Union room 214.
Gabriela Quintero is the Student Life Editor for the University Press. For more information on this story or others, contact Quintero at gquintero2022@fau.edu.
