Self-Funded Body Care Brand Karité Is On The Move At Retail And In Social Media

Almost seven years into its business, body care brand Karité is having one of its best years due to growing awareness and retail distribution.

The brand expects to double revenues in 2024, according to co-founder Akua Okunseinde, who credits its momentum to her full-time focus on the brand after she was laid off from a global account executive role at Google at the beginning of this year. This year, Karité got press hits on morning television program “Today” and in Cosmopolitan and Women’s Wear Daily, where its Crème Corps was named among the most iconic body care products. As a result of an International Women’s Day appearance on “Today,” the brand’s sales tripled in March.

Okunseinde, currently the sole full-time employee at Karité, says, “Karité really started as a pet project, a side hustle, and what’s interesting is, before the layoffs, I’d always told my husband and my family that I want to do Karité full-time. I kind of manifested it through getting laid off, which was an unfortunate time, but I’m also very grateful that I had this passion of working on this business prior to that and just decided this was the time to go full force into it.”

Okunseinde’s sisters, lawyer Abena Slowe and dermatologist Naana Boakye, who is chief medical officer for A-Frame Brands, the incubator behind Naomi Osaka’s brand Kinlò, John Legend’s brand Loved01 and Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade’s brand Proudly, chip in at Karité, too. Slowe is Karité’s COO, Boakye is its CEO, and Okunseinde is its CCO. Okunseinde says, “The three of us have very different backgrounds, but they’re very complementary for starting a business.”

Karité has been accepted into several accelerators, including Nielsen IQ’s Beauty Trailblazer and Dream Ventures Accelerator. The brand recently launched on Saks Fifth Avenue’s website, Amazon and high-end spas such as The Well and Miraval Berkshires Resort & Spa. Additional stockists are The Detox Market, Thirteen Lune and Anthropologie along with a few small independent beauty stores across the United States and Canada.

The brand started in February 2017 with a single product, $36 hand cream Creme Mains. The $46 body cream Crème Corps was released in the same year in November. The brand’s only other product at the moment, $25 lip balm Baume à Lèvres lip balm, was introduced in 2021. The sisters are working on products slated for launch in the next year or two that could fall into the facial, haircare or sun care categories. Okunseinde says, “We were very intentional about not expanding too quickly and wanted to create a very small curated line.”

Karité’s products are powered by raw, unrefined shea butter. Its sibling co-founders grew up using the ingredient. Their family members would bring home tubs of it from trips to Ghana. “We used to mix it with over-the-counter lotion because shea butter can be really hard to spread on the skin, and it’s not that aesthetically pleasing,” recalls Okunseinde. “One day we were thinking to ourselves, why are we losing the efficacy of this amazing ingredient of shea butter and mixing it with drugstore lotion that potentially has a lot of chemicals and could have irritants and things that could be sensitive to our skin? And decided that we wanted to create something that was really natural with very simple ingredients with high concentrations of the shea butter because that really didn’t exist in the market.”

While Slowe, Boakye and Okunseinde began brainstorming what their brand would look like, Boakye was receiving questions from her patients about the ingredients they should be applying on their body to soothe dry skin. Shea butter was her go-to ingredient for their issues. Okunseinde reports, “There was a need for this. Patients are asking for it of all ages and genders and skin types and skin tones.”

Karité’s customer base is largely composed of women aged 25 to 44 years old, although its products are suitable for people of any age. Okunseinde has used its body cream on her two boys since they were babies. The brand elicits customers primarily through email marketing and organic press hits. Okunseinde discloses that Karité’s customer return rate stands at 30%.

Currently, Karité is concentrating on figuring out its footing on social media platforms. Posts about the sister co-founders tend to be strong performers. Okunseinde engages with TikTok content about working moms and entrepreneurs, and Karité taps Boakye’s expertise as a dermatologist. Boakye has over 14,000 followers on Instagram. Okunseinde says, “Only 3% of all physicians are Black dermatologists, so Naana is a very unique person, and people really enjoy her content.”

Retail expansion is a goal going forward. Karité is targeting upscale grocery retailers like Whole Foods, Sprouts and Erewhon as well as specialty beauty retailers like Ulta Beauty and Credo. To help it scale, it’s considering external investment. Karité is self-funded, and each sister invested $15,000 to launch its business.

Okunseinde says, “We are a family business, we are bootstrapped, and we recognize that in order to expand and do retail right, we probably need to have some sort of infusion of capital, whether that’s an angel round or a friends and family round.”