It takes a lot of audacity to sell your home for capital to start a new business, but that kind of chutzpah is baked into Desiree Noisette’s family history. “I sat down with [my husband], and I said, ‘Listen, our neighbors just put their house on the market, and it’s sold in two days, and they got a ridiculous price for it.
What do you think, if we sell our house?” Noisette said. “I used our existing kind of windfall in real estate for our house, to kickstart everything.” That is how Mermosa began 4 years ago in St.
Petersburg. Desiree Noisette credits it all to Celestine Noisette, her ancestor who lived in Haiti during the late 1700s and married a white Frenchman named Phillipe. “They get married in Haiti, and then they go to Charleston,