Essentials

By Ruth Okwumbu Profile

A Beauty Brand from a Bible Verse: Meet Ore Runsewe of Arami Essentials

It may not be uncommon to see businesses that find their foundation in some religious saying or quote, but the thought of a beauty brand drawing its inspiration and slogan from a verse of the Holy Bible raised more than a pair of eyebrows.

Arami Essentials, founded by Ore Runsewe, is one of Nigeria’s home-grown beauty brands that has grown over the last few years to earn its place as a brand that knows how to play branding game and win.

Runsewe says she drew the brand inspiration from a verse from the Holy Bible – “Your body is the temple of the holy spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

“Skin and hair have been an integral part of my life since I was a child. I had severe eczema for a long time, so keeping the skin moisturised was central to my life! As I got older, I began to really love experimenting with different ingredients on my skin and natural hair,” she recounted in an interview.

Ore Runsewe was born and schooled in the United Kingdom, with an educational background primarily in public relations and digital marketing.

She worked as a Public Relations/ Communications consultant in the UK, before returning to Nigeria in 2014 to do the compulsory National Youth Service Corps programme.

She worked with the Women in Management, Business and Public Service, a non-governmental organisation based in Lagos; Hill+Knowlton Strategies, a communications consultancy firm; and then with an investment bank’s communications/digital marketing team.

After relocating to Nigeria, Runsewe saw that some of the skin and hair products she used while growing up in the United Kingdom were not readily available on store shelves in Nigeria, and when they were, they were overpriced. As someone with a very sensitive skin, she decided to start creating her own alternatives instead of just resigning herself to any other toxic option.

“I started looking into what people used in Nigeria and the kinds of things that were available like the ingredients and products. That led me into looking into shea butter, black soap, coconut oil, and so on. I started experimenting with those things for myself, and that basically grew into what is now Arami,” she recounts.

She continues: “The word Arami directly translated to “my body” in Yoruba, and the idea of creating “Arami (my body) essentials” is aligned with treating the body right. “Your Body is a Temple” reminds me to treat my body with respect, which flows into what I put on my skin & hair, what I wear, what I eat, what I think about and even how I spend my time,” Ore says about the brand. Arami essentials started in late 2016 from Ore’s bedroom, with very little capital, which she used for ingredients and packaging material. For a long time, she juggled the business with her 9 to 5 full-time job. She reinvested all proceeds from the business back into it while living off her job.

This strategy worked well and kept the business through the early days when many others failed due to funding problems. With no overhead costs in the form of rent and utilities, the business stabilised, and Ore moved from her bedroom to a smaller room in her house and then to a space she built at the back of her compound.

One can easily tell that these movements meant more orders needed to be fulfilled. In October 2021, Arami Essentials launched it’s first factory at Nigeria Foundries in Lagos.

Arami Essentials took a unique route in its branding by attaching promise cards to its packages for delivery. According to Runsewe, it is a way to show them that they are a part of the brand story.

She says, “customers don’t just want to receive things from a brand. They want to feel like they are part of the brand, and they want to have an experience when they are receiving their products. So, putting promise cards in the package lets them know that we’re thinking of them constantly, and we appreciate them for buying from us. They are a huge part of our lives. We just always want to remind our customers that we are thinking of them constantly, and we always want to make sure that they are happy.”

The promise cards come with messages like ‘Everything will be beautiful in its own time,’ ‘Peace that passes all understanding,’ ‘Patience, love is kind.’

The messages target the customers’ physical and mental, and emotional well-being.

Mimi Plange: The Ghanaian Designer Who Did Odd Jobs before Launching Her Clothing Line

After doing many odd jobs and then landing a role with a major urban fashion label, Mimi Plange made her dreams a reality and launched her thriving eponymous fashion label.

While still a little kid, her family moved to California. This became an open door for her to achieve her goals. She attended the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in California and earned a BA in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, before that. After finishing her education, she traveled to New York and worked for Rachel Roy and Patricia Fields.

Her designs draw inspiration from her African ancestry. Rihanna, Serena Williams, and the first lady Michelle Obama have all been her clients. On the ABC television program The View, Michelle donned her A-line skirt.

Early life and education

At an early age, her mother and uncle influenced her interest in fashion. Her architect uncle instilled in her a love for music and the arts, which sparked her own imagination. Mimi Plange learned the flute, but knew from an early age that her career would be in fashion design.

Some of her favourite visual artists were Nandipha Mntambo, Wangechi Mutu, and Kehinde Wiley.

Mimi Plange arrived in New York one month after receiving her degree from the FIDM. She worked a few odd jobs until landing one at a well-known urban luxury brand, which led to many new opportunities.

She was able to land a position as an assistant in the menswear section despite having no prior expertise designing men’s clothing but a solid portfolio in the very competitive talent pool that is New York City. She claims that it was an incubation phase that improved her understanding of the commercial side of the sector.

Starting a label

She eventually founded a brand with her husband, initially going by the name Boudoir D’Huitres, which she later renamed to the current personal label Mimi Plange. Her personal experience, architectural training, and desire to create clothing for ladies with a unique sense of style all came combined to influence her creative sensibilities.

Many people go to New York with the same ambition to succeed, but Mimi Plange credits her work ethic in big part for her success. The triumphs she’s enjoyed relatively early in her career don’t seem to have swayed her from reaching for more. She also uses her art to reflect the beauty of Africa on a global scale. Plange was quoted in a 2011 New York Times article as saying:

“I want to prove to people that African fashion can’t be pigeonholed... I can compete globally.”

In none of her creations does Mimi Plange incorporate traditional African materials or prints. In addition, 2011 was the year when Michelle Obama, the former first lady, made her television appearance on The View while sporting an A-line skirt by Mimi Plange, which put her on the radar.

Scarred Perfection, her spring 2012 collection, referred to the body scars that Africans would wear as a means of tribe identification. To quote Plange:

“I am motivated by those things that make us question how we represent ourselves to others.”

In the fall of 2012, Mimi Plange was the focus of a brief profile in The New York Times, and during Mercedes Benz Fashion Week South Africa, she was named Designer of the Year.

How Oke Maduewesi Founded and Built Africa’s Leading Cosmetics Brand

There are several entrepreneurs blazing Africa’s trail in the beauty and wellness industry, and somewhere on that list is Oke Maduewesi, Founder and CEO of the Zaron Group of companies, comprising Zaron International Limited and Zaron Cosmetics Limited. In less than two decades, Oke Maduewesi has applied her experience in the banking and business sectors to build a formidable international brand in a market that already seemed saturated.

Recounting the story behind the Zaron brand, Maduewesi says that she conceived the idea during her Master’s program in Business Administration at the Leeds Business School.

In the early 2000s, Maduewesi had just relocated with her two kids to the United Kingdom, to pursue a new chapter of her life, leaving behind a secure job as a Bank Manager in Port Harcourt. “I felt the need to grow but wasn’t sure of what exactly, except perhaps I thought to grow in managerial skills to elevate and dominate in the same sector”, she says.

Even though she had a first degree in Economics, she had not considered starting a business until then. As part of the activities in the MBA program, she had to join discussion groups where they reviewed different case studies of businesses and tried to pick out lessons from them. It did not take long before Oke started to wonder why all the business cases being reviewed were foreign businesses. It would seem that no big business arose out of the African continent. Maduewesi was not comfortable with this and decided that that had to change.

Even before deciding on the industry to play in, she came up with the name Zaron (drawn from her daughters’ names, Zara and Ona). Afterwards, she started looking from industry to industry and decided that the Beauty and Wellness industry was a good choice. There were no prominent African brands playing in that space, even though the industry seemed to be fast-growing. She worked on a Business proposal, which eventually served as the dissertation for her program, and Zaron Cosmetics was born.

Scoring an A in the dissertation gave her more confidence that Zaron would be a sound business decision. She leveraged the vibrant network her banking career had helped her build over the years. The brand was built to serve the African woman. So, from inception, Zaron focused on creating quality products for women of colour at affordable pricing. “We are best equipped to understand our skin tone and texture; taking into consideration our environmental conditions in creating the most suited products for us”, she noted.

The growth journey

Trying to penetrate a market with minimal trust for made-in-Africa beauty brands was not a walk in the park. There were market visits, live demos, across African regions; roadshows, collaborative events and other means of promotion. Maduewesi had to make concessions and compromises along the way.

Zaron lowered the barriers of entry to allow new distributors to enter the chain, offered favourable credit lines, and practically looked out for franchisee partners who would bring their personal drive and passion into the business. Interestingly, the franchise angle helped reduce the capital required to get the products out to new locations, and Zaron cosmetics widened its reach and presence at less capital cost.

Zaron Cosmetics has grown to have a presence in about 10 African countries, extending into North America and the United Kingdom. There are 25 franchisee outlets, over 800 distributors in Nigeria alone and the product has a presence in most cosmetic retail stores.

To keep up with the success, the brand continues to introduce new products based on market needs and surveys carried out by its research and Development team. The research results determine the product to be formulated, the ingredients, texture, colours, and packaging. The brand includes several layers of product testing and sampling on different skin types and through various weather conditions to ensure that the product wears well through hot, humid, rainy, dry and cool weather conditions before it is released to users.

The Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 redefined what was normal for lots of businesses, and Zaron had to make some needed changes to keep their game ahead. Since many people were losing their jobs and sources of income at the time, the company introduced an online sales initiative, called the Zaron Independent Beauty Consultant – a digital platform that allowed individuals to sign up as retailers and earn income with zero capital and without ever handling or delivering the product. This was a kind of drop-shipping arrangement which not only helped Zaron survive the pandemic but to come out stronger.

About growing a business in Nigeria, Maduewesi says, “There is never a comfort zone. Especially when you are running a business in Naija, every day relives fresh challenges. You have to be resolute, but knowing that you have higher returns on investment in running a business in this country is consoling. In addition, because Nigeria is a growing market, there are numerous opportunities.”

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