There’s a hair salon near where I grew up that’s been open for over twenty years. Same owner. Same chair by the window. Generations of women in that neighbourhood have had their first relaxer, their first big-chop, their wedding-day style done in that exact room. If you asked around, everyone would tell you the place matters.
But if you searched for it online, you’d find almost nothing. Maybe a blurry photo on Google Maps. Maybe a flyer taped to a pole from 2019.
That gap — between how much a business means to a community and how little of that meaning exists anywhere visible — is one of the things that pulls me toward this work.
We document companies. We rarely document the people who built them.
Most small businesses, especially ones owned by people of colour, get treated as transactions, not stories. A logo here, a menu there, a flyer for the next promotion. What almost never gets made is the thing that actually explains why the business exists — the story of the person who opened it, what it cost them, who it was for.
That’s a strange omission, because that story is usually the most valuable asset the business has. It’s the reason a loyal customer chooses that spaza shop over the chain down the road, or that tailor over the mall alterations counter. People don’t just buy products. They buy trust, and trust is built on story.
The businesses that have been open the longest — the ones with the most history, the most community weight — are often the least documented, because they were built in an era before “content” was even a category. The owner was too busy running the place to think about video. Which means the story is sitting there, fully formed, waiting for someone to actually go and get it before it’s gone.
And it can go. Owners retire. Buildings change hands. Stories that live only in memory disappear with the people who hold them.
This is what we mean by dignified representation
When we talk about documentary-style video for businesses, we don’t mean a shiny promo reel. We mean sitting down with the person behind the counter and actually asking: how did this start? What did you sacrifice? What do you want people to understand about this place that they’d never guess just walking past it?
That’s a fundamentally different product from a flyer. A flyer tells someone what’s on sale. A documentary tells someone why they should care in the first place — and it does it in a form that can live on a website, get repurposed into a Reel, and outlast the owner’s own memory of the details.
If your family’s business, or a business in your community, has been quietly doing the work for years without anyone properly telling its story — that’s exactly the kind of project we want to be part of. Get in touch with Ronoh Media. Let’s make sure the story doesn’t disappear before someone thinks to ask.