Juliana Pache, a leading entrepreneur of African and Latin heritage is an avid crossword fan. One day, she was trying to solve the mini daily crossword from the New York Times when she stumbled upon a phrase that seemed unfamiliar and more prescriptive to the white folks. As soon as she discovered the world, Juliana was driven by a single goal: to discover a black variant of the same word.
However, even after extensively searching popular Black crosswords, Pache couldn’t discover a similar word. The majority of the puzzles that she scoured through were no longer relevant, somewhere only available digitally in PDF form, and the others didn’t have a wide range of words as she expected. Juliana was not the happiest with the results and so she decided to create her digital crossword that would be inclusive and available to the entire world. Once she came up with this decision, Juliana immediately purchased three domain names to build her platform. Interestingly enough, she also had a name in mind. Her new digitized crossword would be called- Black Crossword.
Finally, Black Crossword saw the light of day this January 20th. From the same time, Juliana has personally curated mini puzzles regularly with unique words that most crossword enthusiasts wouldn’t stumble upon anywhere else.
When asked about her thoughts on building this revolutionary crossword puzzle Julianna directly admitted that she wasn’t even sure what she was ultimately building. Her main idea was to overthrow racism uniquely and that was what this crossword puzzle was all about. Once she was about to complete the puzzle, Juliana did assume that people would probably enjoy the puzzle. However, she was still awaiting feedback for some honest validation from fellow crossword enthusiasts.
While starting a new crossword puzzle might seem intimidating to many, such was certainly not the case with Juliana. On the contrary, she found it easy and convenient. By 2020, she started her first tryst with entrepreneurship by starting the Pache Studio. This was curated and handmade jewelry from Juliana’s collection. At this time, she was also working full-time at Rolling Stone. Last year, in 2022, she decided to leave the job to put her entire focus on creating jewelry. According to her, the decision of allowing some space for her creative decisions led to the advent of Black Crossword. Had she still been working at the rolling stone, she would neither have had the chance nor the opportunity to pursue something so intimately creative.
The biggest highlight of Black Crossword is that every daily puzzle is personally curated by Pache. According to her, this is the coolest aspect of the job. Unlike other crossword professionals, she does not rely on a general list but is more focused on building something new and unique. She wants to identify and introduce the many terms that aren’t otherwise featured in popular crossword lists
Juliana wants to assign many beautiful meanings to each word. She also wants to bring out all of those words that do not typically get the attention they deserve. Again, you also have words with multiple meanings, and she wants to feature those phrases in her puzzles as well. Even though the task seems challenging, Juliana seems to be enjoying every bit of exploring and assigning new meanings to each word.
Another interesting bit about Black Crossword is that it also features the names of leading Black personalities, colloquial black words, slang, Black musical elements, or references among others. When asked how long it takes to create each puzzle, Juliana says the smallest ones can take up to 20 minutes while the more complex ones can go up to a whopping hour.
Given the variety of the puzzles and the quirkiness of the format itself, Juliana’s puzzles seem to have an ever-increasing fanbase who have incorporated the puzzle into their regular routines. Juliana says that when people play the puzzle, she wants them to realize that the Black culture is just as imperative and crucial as the other cultures around us. The crossword is her way of disseminating that message.
Even though the crossword has only been on the shelves for a few months Juliana believes that the crossword will make it big one day. She wants to expand it further by adding books and similar merch. Finally, she also hopes that the individuals playing the crossword find it truly rewarding and they also get their chance to learn everything about the Black culture.
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