Jackie Spencer Built Vylvet So Small Businesses Can Sell Online.
“Detroit founder Jackie Spencer launched Vylvet after a 2021 traffic jam revealed a gap no one was closing. Now 59 merchants are selling digitally because of it.”
It is a Thursday afternoon in 2021, and Jackie Spencer is stuck in traffic somewhere on a Detroit expressway, errand list growing, clock running. She pulls up her phone. Within minutes, she has arranged delivery from three major retailers, groceries, household goods, whatever she needs, without ever leaving her car. The on demand economy works. It works well. Then the question lands: What about the store around the corner? The woman selling handmade goods at the weekend market? The neighborhood merchant who can't afford a web developer or a monthly SaaS subscription?
That question did not let her go. She decided to answer it.
Jackie Spencer is the founder of Vylvet, Inc., based in Detroit. She describes her work in clear, practical terms: she is becoming a marketplace expert by building an affordable option for small business owners to sell their products. Not a disruptor. Not a visionary. A builder with a specific job, close the gap between entrepreneurship and digital commerce for the merchants who have been priced out of both.
Detroit's small business economy is not short on entrepreneurs. It is short on infrastructure built for them. A 2024 regional survey of 1,235 small business owners in the Detroit area found that 61% identified as Black and 73% as women, a portrait of a local economy driven by founders who are structurally underserved by the platforms designed to help them grow. Nationally, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Black founded startups raised roughly one third as much venture capital as comparable startups over their first five years. Less capital means fewer options. Fewer options means that when the technology gap widens, it widens unevenly, and the merchants who need digital tools the most are the ones who can afford them least.
The on demand economy has not been neutral. It has accelerated the advantage of businesses that were already online, already funded, already connected. Every year that a small merchant operates without a digital storefront is a year that customer base, revenue, and reach drift toward whoever showed up in the search results. The problem is not that small businesses lack ambition. The problem is that the entry cost, technical complexity, monthly fees, integration headaches, has functioned as a gate. Vylvet is being built to take that gate down.
Spencer came to this problem without a technical background, without experience running a product based business, and without anyone in her immediate network who had built a technology company before. Capital was scarce. The knowledge infrastructure that founders in better resourced zip codes take for granted, advisors, engineers, peers who've been through it, was not within easy reach. She was a first time founder looking at a complex technical build with no map and no co pilot who had flown this route before.
The choice was made in traffic, but it held. She did not wait until she had a technical background. She did not wait until she knew someone who had done it. She took the question she'd been handed, why can't the small store get the same tools as the big box, and decided that if the answer didn't exist, she would build it.
Spencer entered TechTown Detroit's Start Studio program alongside her sister in law, and the program became the first real on ramp. Through Start Studio, they learned to build their first prototype in Figma, translating what had been an idea stuck in traffic into something a developer could read, react to, and build from. That prototype opened the next door: the Detroit tech ecosystem connected them with a developer who could take the wireframes and turn them into a functioning platform.
The road from concept to coded product was not clean. Spencer learned, the hard way, that a great idea is only the beginning. She had to learn to define the problem precisely, to validate that merchants actually needed the solution before building it, and to communicate a technical vision she was still learning to speak herself. She learned that entrepreneurship requires tolerating stretches of not having the answer and building anyway.
The skeptic's question for any early stage marketplace is always the same: do people actually use it? Vylvet launched its MVP in 2024, three years after that Thursday afternoon in traffic. As of this writing, the platform has 59 merchants and 516 customers signed up (self reported). The company has raised $170,000 in venture investment (self reported). The platform allows merchants to launch a digital storefront in minutes, upload thousands of SKUs, configure billing, and connect delivery and shipping integrations, including Uber and FedEx, without a technical team. Spencer founded the company in 2021. The MVP went live in 2024. That is three years of building as a non technical, first time founder in a city where, as the data makes plain, the deck is not shuffled evenly.
What Vylvet is building is not just a commerce platform. It is compressing the distance between having an idea and being able to sell. If that distance shrinks, if the next merchant can launch a digital storefront in minutes instead of months, without a developer, without a prohibitive monthly fee, then the question stops being can I afford to go online and starts being where do I want to grow. That shift matters for individual merchants. It matters for Detroit's neighborhoods, where small businesses are not just economic units but anchors of place and community. And it maps onto a larger national argument: that closing the technology access gap for Black and women owned businesses is not charity. It is the condition under which those businesses can compete, generate wealth, and employ people. The entrepreneur who doesn't have to spend two years solving the platform problem can spend two years growing the business. That time is not abstract. It is revenue, employees, and staying power.
Fifty nine merchants is a beginning, not a ceiling. If you are rooting for Detroit's small businesses to compete in the on demand economy, go to Vylvet.co and then tell one small business owner you know that the door is open and the sign up is waiting.
