A Luxury Shea Brand Whose Butters Provide As Much Of A Premium Experience As Its Packaging
We sat down with Naa-Sakle Akuete, the co-founder of Eu’Genia Shea to chat about her family-run social enterprise dedicated to premium shea butter.
Now when we think of shea butter, we often times think of the guys on the streets of Harlem selling tubs of shea alongside incense and musk oils. Some of us even have the pleasure of supporting minimalist indie brands like Dimple and Dot and Hanahan Beauty who have amazing shea butter in glass jars.
But have you seen a quality shea butter brand whose contents are in 1.6 ounce individually engraved tin containers???
Photo by MelaninASS
“When I started designing – I wanted the packaging to relay how special the product was inside. This is a high quality product that providing you with a premium experience and I couldn’t think of a better way to do that. ”
Photo by MelaninASS
Eu’Genia Shea is a family-run social enterprise dedicated to all natural premium shea butter moisturizers. This mother-daughter started the brand in 2015 but the real beginning started in 2000, when Eugenia Akuete (mother), took a trip to her native Ghana after winning a two-year fight with colon cancer. In rediscovering her love and connection to shea butter – she quickly learned quite a bit:
Image by Global Shea Alliance
- The shea butter industry in Ghana is a female driven community that supports themselves entirely from the shea industry
- For a number of reasons they have taken advantage of because many of them don’t speak English, are illiterate and don’t have access to basis technology
- Exploitation creates a circumstance when where distributors buy low and sell high on the global market –cutting the makers out of valuation pyramid
Therefore, Eugenia began helping to strengthen existing cooperatives to give these women more marketing power through representation and quality improvement. Additionally, she became the president of the Global Shea Alliance and became a force in the industry selling bulk shea butter by the ton.
“One of the things my mom realized is that when you’re selling to other businesses – they don’t really care about the quality and the integrity of the supply chain– they only care about price”
Photo by MelaninASS
So it only made sense that Eu’Genia Shea (named after Naa-Sakle’s mom) was born. Eu' Genia which means the “origin of goodness” – is fitting for a brand that makes wholesome high quality products with a mission.
The product line includes 3 variations of shea butter: 1) Everyday Shea Butter, 2) Pregnancy Strength Shea Butter and 3) Dermatologist Shea Butter. All of their products include 5 ingredients with about 95% shea content. (Most other products on the market are about 25% shea.) The ingredients include shea butter, shea oil, baobab oil, moringa oil and essential oils (lavendar or grapefruit).
Photo by MelaninASS
“The more shea butter the better, but not all shea butter is created equal.”
Part of creating quality and highly concentrated products, is focusing on supply chain transparency. Eu'genia Shea is genuinely dedicated to fair wages and opportunities for their female workers in Ghana. Additionally, they donate 15% of profits back to them in the form of an education fund!
Photo by MelaninASS