Sugarbound Society didn't begin with a brand strategy session or a mood board. It started with my mother's idea, a simple question about whether treats could travel alongside a story, and my hunger to know Black literature more deeply than I had been taught.

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The original name was Sweet Reads Society. It felt right. It was warm, literary, and easy to say. But when I discovered another Virginia business operating under a nearly identical name, a bakery making book-inspired treats at a market, I had to let it go. I understood immediately what it would feel like if someone built something so close to my work and called it by the name I'd created.

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So, I sat with the loss of it and started again. After a lot of back and forth, I landed on Sugarbound Society.

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I thought the word held everything I needed. I didn't realize at the time how much more it held. Sugar, because sweetness is at the center of what Tastease makes and what this society is built around. Bound, because this project is about being tied to something: to story, to community, to people who show up and stay. And bound in one more way I love: the literal spine of a book. The binding that holds a story together. Sugarbound felt like the right word for all of that at once.

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I made sure no other business was using it. I came across a broad, general definition, societies bound to the production of sugar and moved forward.

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I wasn't looking for it. One day the question just came to me. Had I ever searched this phrase alongside Black history? I hadn't. So, I did.

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The answer stopped me.

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Sugarbound, historically, refers to the brutal, often fatal connection between enslaved Black people and the sugar trade. The plantations, the Caribbean, Louisiana, the millions of lives consumed by a commodity that built other people's wealth. That history is real. It is part of us. And I had not thought about it when I chose this name.

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I'm saying it plainly because I'd rather you hear it from me.

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I could have quietly changed it. Instead, I'm choosing to say it out loud, because this project was built by me, a Black woman. Built with intention, around Black stories; our classics and those that one day will be. Around our joy, our community, our way of gathering. A word that carries this kind of weight belongs to us to reclaim, and that's exactly what we're doing, what I am doing.

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Because that is also what Black literature does. It takes the weight of history and transforms it into something you can survive, something you can share, something that makes you feel less alone. From the page to the plate, that's what we're doing here too.

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Being sugarbound, in this space, means something different. It means being tied to the sweetness of story. Bound to the people who show up every month to sit with a book, share a treat, and be seen. Connected by the spine of a book, by the care in something made by hand, by the collective act of reading ourselves into existence.

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We didn't erase the history. We inherited it, looked at it honestly, and decided to build something better inside it.

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Ashley

Founder, Sugarbound Society