About Elizabeth Sapara-Grant

Ever since I was a kid, my dad has owned and operated many small businesses in New York and Ghana. Closest to home, and dearest to my heart, he owned a sports clothing store in the Bronx when I was a young child. On Friday nights, my family and I would run this store while my dad was out of town. The store had one of the flashiest signs on the block, with its name, “SAPARA SAPARA,” in giant letters. There was a symbol on the sign in Fante called “Bibi Wo Soro” which asks God for his blessing over our business.

Whenever I was in SAPARA SAPARA, I would sit in the back room watching cartoons, trying to peek at the merchandise — vintage Jordan sneakers, rare sports jerseys, everything trendy at that time — and excited to see all the people walking in. University students, kids from the neighborhood, and collectors would come flocking to the store, looking for the rare merch we sold.

My dad is a true self-made man. He is always striving and challenging himself to become an elevated version of himself. When my dad first moved to New York from Ghana, it was not his decision. Like me, my dad had a dream of starting his own business from a very young age: by the age of 16, he already had a plan to study biochemistry and start a pharmaceutical company in Ghana. But when my dad finished high school, my grandparents wanted him to move to New York to establish a life for his brothers and sisters, so that they would have better opportunities for education and life.

By the time he was 21, much had changed for my dad: he was working for a restaurant by the World Trade Center as a busboy, waiter, and bartender. This lasted for about eight years; this was the only time in his life he worked for someone else. The business couldn’t continue after 9/11, and he didn’t know what he would do to make a living, but he knew one thing: he didn’t want to have to work for a boss ever again. He got the idea of opening his own store from a friend who was successful doing the same. From his aspirations to opening a pharmaceutical company, to his success in the restaurant industry in Manhattan, he ended up making the biggest shift possible: opening SAPARA SAPARA in the Bronx. There, he started learning what it takes to build a business: the marketing, procurement, and management skills he would take to all his future ventures. About 2 years after I was born, my dad received a government contract in Ghana to produce his own line of fertilizer, which is now used for all of the cocoa farms in the country. This business has opened so many doors for him, and he is now working on opening a new business in Dubai.

But out of all my dad’s international business journeys, I am still most awed by what it took to run a store in the Bronx: the flashiness to stand out from the crowd, the increasing need for exclusive merchandise to beat competitors in the market, and the bravery to run a store in a neighborhood where theft was so common. And I remember being so proud of the success of SAPARA SAPARA even at a young age. People came to the store because we had some of the best products in the neighborhood, and you could tell our customers respected the store for this. As I dream of starting my own business some day, I can only hope my customers will be as satisfied as my father’s.