Chaka Howard builds successful business after corporate layoff

The call came two months after Chaka Howard had been promised she was safe.

After nearly nine years in corporate marketing at Red Bull, surviving round after round of layoffs, Howard was let go along with several colleagues. The company replaced them with entry-level hires. It stung. But Howard, a Houston native who had started her career as a brand ambassador and worked her way up to field marketing manager for some of the nation’s biggest brands, did not stay down for long.

Today, Howard is the owner of Indigo Event Marketing, a full-service event production, brand staffing, and experiential marketing agency operating in every major U.S. market with more than 200 contract employees. Clients include Foot Locker, Anheuser-Busch, White Claw, and the Houston launch of Travis Scott’s Cacti beverage brand. 

“One hundred percent of my business has been referrals,” Howard said. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

Howard grew up in Houston and graduated from the University of Houston. Her corporate career spanned some of the most recognizable brands in the consumer goods space, including Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and Vita Coco. But even as she excelled, she watched Black colleagues absorb a disproportionate share of budget cuts and workforce reductions.

“Being in marketing, whenever people cut budgets, marketing is the first to go,” she said. “And being a minority, I was always one of the first ones to go, or it was another peer who was just excellent at what they did.”

Howard saw the writing on the wall before the layoff came. A new vice president arrived, flew the team in for a major training, and told everyone in the room they were safe. Two days later, a wave of terminations rolled through. Two months after that, Howard got the call.

“There can be a promise, there can be anything, and there’s just no guarantee,” she said. “That is one thing that made my skin tougher.”

She had already begun building Indigo on the side while working a contract position after Red Bull. She kept it quiet until she slipped and mentioned it to the wrong person. She was let go from that job, but this time, she had clients waiting.

“I would have stayed there forever if that didn’t happen,” Howard said. “That gave me the chance to say, I have all the tools that I need. I have clients. Let me do this 100% on my own.”

Lauren Suggs, a veterinary technician who met Howard in 2016 when she was hired onto Howard’s brand marketing team for Purina, said the hustle was always there.

“That woman is so motivated, she’s definitely got fire within her,” Suggs said. “I always knew no matter what, she’s going to be okay.”

Suggs recalled the early days of Indigo as a steep learning curve for everyone involved. Howard was hands-on in every detail, making calls to stores, managing staff, and filling gaps herself when needed.

“She built it from the ground up,” Suggs said. “She was not one of those business owners who’s hands off. She did not have a problem making phone calls to stores when it was needed.”

That commitment to quality runs through every layer of the agency. Howard pays her brand ambassadors weekly, while many competing agencies delay payments by a month or more. She invests in team-building and ambassador recognition programs. 

“If something happens, they’re not going to put it back on that brand ambassador,” she said. “It’s going to come straight back to me.”

As the current political climate has accelerated corporate DEI rollbacks, with brands like Walmart, Meta, and Foot Locker scaling back diversity investments and marketing budgets, Howard says she is watching the shift closely. 

She holds a certification as a minority-owned business, though she acknowledges she has not yet fully leveraged it. More immediately, she is feeling the tightening of client budgets across several of her major accounts.

“A lot of things that we did last year, we didn’t do this year,” Howard said. “Budget has been a big thing lately. But as times change, we have to change.”

Her response has been to diversify her client base and lean into collaboration, including partnering with other Houston-based entrepreneurs to build new revenue streams outside her traditional beverage and retail verticals. She also has a sharper understanding now of when to say no. Early in Indigo’s growth, she said yes to last-minute activations to avoid losing clients, even when her team was not positioned to deliver at full capacity. That lesson cost her.

“They hired you to be the expert,” Howard said. “They’d rather you say no than take on something you can’t handle and embarrass them and embarrass yourself even more.”

Owning a business is hard in ways that are not always visible from the outside, including the reality that some months, her staff gets paid before she does.

“Pick and choose your hard,” she said. “Make a list of your pros and cons on both and go from there. And be grateful, for where you are, for what you’ve built, for what you survived.”