Today is a very big and exciting day for us. Today is the first day that Simone Digital, our digital baby is presented to the world. Presented to You. It’s been such an exciting, terrifying and exhausting journey with no shortage of major hiccups. Even this morning the site threw some serious caching errors before we launched that had our team scrambling, but we are finally live!
Simone Digital is a community. A platform for women creatives from filmmakers and writers to artists and academics and those who support them. Bringing this site to life has been an idea of mine for so long and for a while I was not sure how I was going to pull it off. I knew it would be a challenge but I also knew there were other women out there who wanted to be a part of something like this just as much as I did, and we wanted to create a space that was reflective of that. Simone Digital is brought to you by a team of women–with a few amazing male allies thrown in. What once was just me sitting in my dining room pounding out articles has grown into a team of incredibly talented, strong and admirable women and men. It’s because of their devotion and drive as well that Simone Digital exists.
Simone (Simone Digital) is an online women’s interest platform. We are bigger than just being a website with articles and pretty pictures. We are a production and editorial company that exists online as a website and video channel. The biggest difference between KIFK and Simone is that we are fully devoted to celebrating the diversity and complexity of womanhood. This is much, much more than hair. Simone will offer a fresh and intelligent perspective and inspire the conversations surrounding real women through a distinctive aesthetic we began crafting with KIFK by way of a combination of original photography, writing and short films while remaining candid and real.
Halting production on K is for Kinky was an extremely difficult decision to make and honestly I struggled to make this leap for over a year. I wanted KIFK to embody what Simone is but it was never going to work. The reality was, the places I wanted us to go and experience didn’t fit into the site so this was a natural progression of growth. I went back and forth so much, but soon it became evident that my heart was just not in only hair any more. To be honest it (hair) was never my main love. If you’ve followed KIFK for a while you’re probably well aware that we always touched on a bit of everything. Often certain articles stuck out like a sore thumb as irrelevant to the brand overall and that was always something we realized. Personally I had to move on because at the end of the day I am a creative and always have been. I was not doing my best to serve you or our team with a heart that had fallen out of love and was only lukewarm on a good day. Do I still love natural hair? Yes I do, but there are only so many detangling articles one can write. And the great thing is that all of the content you loved about KIFK will be on Simone Digital in the coming months as we build out our archives.
Simone exists because of you. Because like you we want to see more inspiring images of women who look like us, women who are #beautyinourreflection. We want to hear their voices and invest in their story. This will manifest in roundtable discussions, films, original series production and much more. Black womanhood is so complex and we do not have the privilege of only caring about bottles of shampoo or fancy, over-priced lipstick. We have to tackle life head on in ways that often only other women of color can understand. We want to acknowledge that because we too live that reality. Simone will be a journey and I hope you enjoy the ride. We can’t promise you perfection but what we can promise you is that we’ll do our best to continue to create content that makes you feel inspired and reflects your authenticity and all of the diversity within that.
xx
– Angel
Founder and Creative Director
SimoneDigital.com
