8 minute read
Lina Gadi
The Tanzanian women in my life have driven me to carve MY OWN VERSION OF SUCCESS
No more stealing your girlfriend’s conditioner! The Aaron Wallace range of natural hair and beard care products are tailored especially for black men. The brand’s Tanzanian co-founder, Lina Gadi, reveals how the products have shaken up the global grooming industry and expresses her delight that they are now available to the African market.
African hair is magical and beautiful, but it can be difficult to maintain and requires specialised care and styling. The global skin and haircare market may be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but the vast majority of it overlooks dark skin shades and natural afro hair. The problem is especially acute for black men, with the number of products optimised for their hair severely lacking.
How welcome then is natural hair care brand Aaron Wallace? This recent, award-winning addition to the market is specially formulated to meet the grooming needs of men of African heritage. Its premium hair and beard care products blend ingredients such as mango, shea, castor and coconut that replenish moisture in afro-textured hair, which can be prone to dryness, without stripping away its natural oils. The result is soft, healthy hair with long-lasting moisture. The brand started small three years ago –products were packaged for postal orders from the back room of a barbershop in London, UK – but its reach soon rocketed. Its hair and beard oil was named among UK men’s style magazine GQ’s best grooming products last year and the full Aaron Wallace range is now available to customers across the world thanks to the brand’s recent partnership with global online retailer Asos. This, of course, includes the African market, something Aaron Wallace co-founder Lina Gadi – who has Tanzanian parents – is very excited about.
All-natural – the Aaron Wallace conditioner contains mango butter and black seed oil
“I am proud of my Tanzanian heritage and nothing would make me happier than growing a successful company that Tanzanians can benefit from as well,” she says. “Beyond that Africa is a beautiful continent full of endless possibilities. It was always our goal to enter the market at some point, this Asos deal has only served to speed up that timeline. I am confident that Aaron Wallace will perform well in Africa. We have already seen a sharp increase in traffic from Nigeria and Ghana and so this partnership comes at the perfect time and means we can service the whole of Africa and beyond.”
Gadi was born in the UK and spent most of her childhood in the Netherlands, an international upbringing that suited her mother’s job as a flight attendant for airlines including Air Tanzania. Her proudly Tanzanian parents also ensured her daughters were fluent in Swahili as well as English and Dutch. The family also maintained close links to relations back home.
Gadi says: “I was raised in a Tanzanian household with all the traditions that accompany it. My mother did an incredible job of raising both my sister and I to speak fluent Swahili, which strengthened our ties to Tanzania and is also the reason I identify as a Tanzanian, despite not being born there. I spent a lot of time visiting family in Tanzania during my childhood, including extended summer holidays mostly in Dar Es Salaam’s Mikocheni, Oyster Bay and Masaki regions.”
Lina Gadi with the Aaron Wallace range
Inspirational mother
Gadi also credits her mother with inspiring her to pursue a life with meaning. “Without doubt, I am who I am because of my mother and everything she taught me,” she says. “I am completely inspired by and driven by her. I am also very fortunate to be surrounded by formidable women in the form of my aunts who each, through their own successes, continue to show me what it means to be a phenomenal black woman. They have all played a role in giving me the drive to carve out my own version of success and for me that means building something that will outlive me and hopefully go some way towards making the world a better place.”
Gadi’s mother sadly died in 2014, but her guidance still resonates. The loss hit the family hard and the griefstricken Gadi felt unable to continue the good work of Start Young Global, a business resource hub she had set up to support budding millennial entrepreneurs.
Barber beginnings
Start Young Global’s founding members included Gadi’s sister, Jusnah, and Aaron Wallace, a former music teacher and kindred spirit who shared Gadi’s drive to make a mark in life. The pair clicked immediately. “Working with Aaron was easy then and still is easy now,” she says. At that time, Wallace was the owner of the Shear & Shine Barbershop in south London. The highly successful, sociable place was packed night and day with punters who came not just because of Wallace’s expertise with the clippers, but also to chat with friends and just hang out.
Among the regular topics of conversations that would bounce around the barbers would be the issues of getting good products for afro hair.
Gadi would often drop by the barbers and was familiar with the complaints. She says: “As a black woman, I know the struggle of finding the right products for my hair and skin all too well and being in the barbershop I got to see how much black men struggled even more to get their hands on the right products. So much so that most of the men we spoke to either accepted their hair and skin problems as ‘that’s just the way it is’, not realising these were solvable issues or they resorted to either creating their own solutions by mixing existing products, using their women’s/ mother’s products or picking up whatever they can find on the shelves and hope for the best.”
Gadi was born to Tanzanian parents in the Netherlands
seal in moisture while softly cleansing the hair and scalp.
Wallace decided to change this situation for black men everywhere and offer them a solution that works. He began research into the natural ingredients best to replenish and protect male afro hair. He put together the Aaron Wallace three-part grooming system with shampoo, moisturiser and conditioner containing naturally derived mango butter and black seed oil to
The brand was launched and Gadi was onboard from the start. With limited financial backing the pair had to be very hands-on in their roles. “We would normally set aside two hours at the end of the day to get all the orders from that day dispatched,” she says. “Luckily we had a post office right next door to the barbershop which meant we didn’t have to travel too far with lots of packages. I’ll be honest, as impractical as it was to continue packaging and posting our products ourselves, I do miss that period in time. I really enjoyed getting stuck in and in the process felt closer to our customers.”
In expanding the profile of the brand, Gadi’s marketing experience was crucial. A keen filmmaker in her teens, she opted to pursue film studies degree as a degree at university, but her head was soon turned to an advertising and marketing communications course, which Gadi, a “natural people’s person” thought a better fit. She didn’t look back.
Building the brand
“What I love about marketing is the relationship between brand and people,” she says. “That understanding helped me create that initial buzz about Aaron Wallace. The first press release we put out went viral ended up in local, national and even international media. This created a huge launch platform for us. Our story was shared over 100,000 times all across the world, which was unexpected and just fantastic. I believe the reason it was such a huge story is because people were shocked to realise black men were still so under-represented in the male grooming industry. I think people loved to see us trying to do something about it and were eager to support us in bringing about that change. Self-care is just as important to black men as it is to everyone else and the fact that so many people were willing to share our story just proves that.”
She has also built a digital presence for the brand, creating an online community forum that globalises the barbershop banter that first convinced Wallace there was a need for his grooming products.
Gadi with business partner Aaron Wallace
Going global
The Asos partnership has taken the brand to another level and the new global audience will soon have more products to choose from as Aaron Wallace brings out its own skincare range later this year.
“We have been working hard to formulate a natural, high quality skin care range that will help black men reduce the risk of ingrown hair and keep the skin nicely moisturised in the process,” says Gadi. “This is only the beginning for Aaron Wallace and there will be many more product launches in the future, all with the goal of helping black men take better care of their hair, their beards and their skin.”
Gadi hopes that will include plenty of men in this country. She will get a chance to judge the Tanzanian grooming game on a visit to the country – flight restrictions depending – later this year. It promises to be an emotional visit.
“I used to visit at least once a year but that all changed after my mother sadly passed away. I miss Tanzania and my family terribly; I hope to return this year to my favourite country. No matter how long I stay away, going there always feels like coming home.”
FURTHER INFORMATION
For more details on the full range, blog posts on afro male grooming and joining the Aaron Wallace community, visit byaaronwallace.com
To shop the Aaron Wallace range on Asos, visit asos.com
