Though Subriana Pierce has resided in Southern California for nearly 15 years now, “I am a Deep South girl,” she says.
Pierce was born in the South Georgia town of Moultrie. Moves to Mobile, Alabama, and then Jackson, Mississippi, followed. The daughter of a high school vocational teacher/auto mechanic and a nurse, Pierce and her younger sister, Shannon, and brother, Stephen, were sent to Catholic school despite the cost.
Her dad fixed cars in the evening after teaching all day in the Jackson public school system, and her mother would often work overnight nursing shifts but be home in the morning to make sure the kids had a good breakfast before school, and then be up and ready for them when they got home from school.
“I feel like I got a lot of my work ethic from [my dad] because he would just work around the clock. He’d put us to work … we’d go out in the middle of the night helping to check whether somebody’s brakes were working,” she said. “My mom, she was a hard worker, and she taught me how to be a good wife and a good mother.”
Pierce said education was (and is) a priority throughout her extended family, which is full of teachers. Her paternal grandmother had a trailer on her property in Mobile that served as a summer school for neighborhood kids. Kindergartners and first graders were invited to come and learn. Subriana attended the school at age 3 when visiting her grandmother that summer.
“I was learning everything everybody else was learning, and I had to contribute to class. I don’t care whether you’re 3 or 4 years old, if you’re in my grandmother’s class, you had to contribute,” she said.
[RELATED: Pierce’s Career Marked By Balancing Ambition, Service To Others]
Though Jackson, Mississippi, was not very segregated in the 1970s while Pierce was growing up – segregation there was more economic than racial, Pierce said – she did have a scary situation arise with her best friend who lived across the street. Her friend was white, and one day when her friend’s father discovered Subriana and his daughter playing in their house, her friend’s mother had to shield Subriana from his wrath. And that’s just one example.
“It’s not easy to shrug off,” Pierce said. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘Well, don’t worry about it. That was just that one person.’ But that was the life we lived in.”
In spite of experiences like that, or perhaps because of them, Pierce was driven to succeed. She excelled academically through the years, and her extracurricular activities included dance, volleyball, church youth group (she did mission work at age 14) and clubs of all kinds. Pierce always felt she needed to be an officer in every club she joined, perhaps an early indicator of her drive to be a leader – or her competitive spirit, which she retains to this day.
Before her father allowed her to go off to Spelman College in Atlanta, he made sure Subriana knew how to maintain her car – change the oil, change a tire, replace the brake pads, etc. At Spelman, a historically Black women’s college, she majored in economics and minored in dance. She had the highest grade-point average of her graduating class in the economics department. She recalls a sign on campus that said the school was for “women who change the world.”
“You’re taught that the whole four years that you’re there, and when I think back on it, that got into my psyche,” Pierce said. “I came out of school saying I’m going to be a CEO of a company. That was it. Didn’t know what company, didn’t know what industry, but I wanted to lead and be a catalyst for change.”
Mission accomplished. After a number of roles in both retail grocery and CPG, she and her husband Allen Pierce founded a food brokerage firm in 2014, Navigator Sales and Marketing, and Subriana served as CEO. (The company was sold to C.A. Fortune last year, with Subriana staying on as SVP.)
They’re working on changing the world, too. The Pierces created the Navigator Lighthouse Foundation to coach, mentor and train those working to get their products onto grocers’ shelves.
And they’ve done the hard but rewarding work of raising six kids along the way, some of whom are working in the grocery industry. A couple also are on the autism spectrum, placing the Pierces in yet another advocacy role. They want people to understand that while those on the spectrum have learning differences, they also have unique strengths that should be celebrated.
Add Comment