This Thanksgiving morning, here is a gratitude story worth sitting with: a beauty empire that began as cosmetology classes in a YMCA classroom, taught by two brothers and their sister. No investors, no shortcuts — just three siblings, a skill, and a family rule that still runs the company today: keep God first, family second and business third.
In 1947, brothers Dr. Nathaniel H. Bronner Sr. and Arthur E. Bronner Sr., together with their sister Emma Bronner, began teaching cosmetology classes at Atlanta’s Butler Street YMCA. That classroom was the seed of Bronner Bros. The company’s first beauty show drew about 300 attendees — a modest room by any measure, but a real beginning, built by a family teaching what it knew to people who wanted to learn it.
Nathaniel’s own road to that classroom says a lot about the man. He had graduated from Apex Beauty College in 1939 — the only man in his class. Readers of this page met Apex earlier in this series, in the story of Sara Spencer Washington; Nathaniel’s diploma ties this family’s story directly back to that earlier generation of Black beauty pioneers. And by the family’s own account, he arrived in Atlanta with $20. That is the family’s telling, and it deserves to be printed as exactly that — the story the Bronners themselves hand down about how little there was at the start, and how far the work carried it.
A motto that is also a business plan
The family ran the business on its motto: “Keep God first, family second and business third.” Read the order carefully, because the order is the point. Business comes third — real, important, but never first. On a day set aside for gratitude, that ordering feels less like a slogan and more like an explanation. A company held together by faith and family, in that order, is a company built to be handed down rather than sold off.
And handed down is exactly what happened. After Nathaniel’s death in 1993, his six sons took over. Six brothers, stepping into a business their father, their uncle and their aunt had started in a borrowed classroom — and keeping it a family business, in the family, run by the family.
Still family-run, three generations on
Under that next generation, the Bronner Bros. show grew into one of the largest Black beauty trade shows in America. That growth is the part of the story that needs no single number attached to it: a show that began with about 300 people in a room became one of the biggest stages in Black beauty, and it did it without the family letting go of it.
Bronner Bros. is still a living family business today — three generations on from that YMCA classroom. The classes became a show. The show became an institution. And through every step of it, the name on the door stayed the family’s own name, and the rule on the wall stayed in its original order: God first, family second, business third.
This Thanksgiving, that might be the most useful kind of success story there is. Not a lone genius. Not a lucky break. A brother, a brother and a sister, teaching in a YMCA in 1947 — and descendants still running what they started, on the same motto, more than three generations later.
Join the conversation
Three siblings, one YMCA classroom, and a motto that put business third — and the business is still family-run today. What family rule or saying has held your family together the longest? Tell us below.
Source note: The Bronner Bros. story — brothers Dr. Nathaniel H. Bronner Sr. and Arthur E. Bronner Sr. and their sister Emma Bronner teaching cosmetology classes at Atlanta’s Butler Street YMCA in 1947; the first beauty show drawing about 300 attendees; Nathaniel’s 1939 graduation from Apex Beauty College as the only man in his class; his arrival in Atlanta with $20, as told in the family’s own account; the family motto “Keep God first, family second and business third”; Nathaniel’s death in 1993 and his six sons taking over; and the show growing into one of the largest Black beauty trade shows in America — is from WABE / NPR Atlanta, Wikipedia, and Monocle.
