Shea Yeleen Showcases The Power Of African Women With Shea Butter Products That Are Hot Sellers At Macy’s

Behind every Shea Yeleen product is the unheralded labor of women lifting themselves to better lives.

Take Gladys, for example. A mother of four and supervisor at a shea butter cooperative in Ghana that sells to the beauty brand, she’s increased her income from $30 to over $300 a month and opened a food stand that she hires her neighbor to operate. Another example is Joana, a Ghanian who’s raised her monthly pay from $120 at a nonprofit to as much as $400 in a management role for Shea Yeleen. She’s constructed a new section of her house with her earnings.

“You cannot get shea butter without an African woman being impacted by the supply chain,” says Rahama Wright, founder of Shea Yeleen, noting the women supplying her brand can make 2,700%-plus more money than typical of the shea butter trade in Africa. “I want to change the way people think about this product and the lack of visibility for women producers, and encourage them to have a much deeper connection to the continent of Africa and the women there.”

In Ghana, where Shea Yeleen gets its shea butter, founder Rahama Wright says women are usually paid 20 cents to 79 cents for a pound of shea butter from a broker that sells to a distribution that sells to an end user such as an indie brand for $2-plus. She continues that Shea Yeleen pays “what an end user would pay, but instead of working through the above chain, we are working directly with the producer, so they are getting more.” Shea Yeleen

Shea Yeleen is attempting to rectify the lack of visibility for women producers by amplifying its visibility as a brand. Last month, it went live on Macy’s website, and sold out of six stockkeeping units across its products Fresh Shea Hand Soap, Pure Shea Body Balm and Clean Shea Bar Soap in less than two weeks. As part of Macy’s partnership with CEW to add 11 Black-owned brands to its assortment, Shea Yeleen is rolling out to select locations at the department store retailer.

The CEW program has been a welcome development for Wright and provides evidence that, when Black-owned brands are afforded chances, they can perform. “I was having a rough time growing the business via retail because competition is so stiff. I’ll be completely honest, I was getting rejected left and right,” says Wright. “Even though we are one of the few brands with ethical sourcing, it was really hard to figure out a way to stand out.”

“You cannot get shea butter without an African woman being impacted by the supply chain.”

The Macy’s rollout also comes after a period of upheaval for Shea Yeleen and the shea butter economy generally due to the effects of the pandemic. “In the last year, our suppliers have been hit very hard. We lost about 70% of our revenue. Ghana closed its borders for about four months, so the processing centers we operate have been temporarily closed,” says Wright. “This new opportunity with Macy’s is really helping us do a tremendous reset.” In 2019, Shea Yeleen’s sales jumped around 60%, and it had a pop-up shop at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that the coronavirus upended.

Shea Yeleen has been through a physical reset, too. “I took a step back and looked at the brand, looked at how other indie brands were presenting themselves and just felt like we were outdated,” explains Wright. Embarking on the rebrand wasn’t an easy or cheap process, though. She cops to wasting $4,000 to $5,000 in search of designers that didn’t pan out for the brand’s revamp.

Shea Yeleen founder Rahama Wright

Wright landed on designer Hannah Saunders, owner of Palindrome Studio, to refresh Shea Yeleen’s exteriors and spent some $20,000 on executing the rebrand. The overhaul rid the brand of secondary boxes, moved it from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) to glass packaging and minimized the explanatory copy on the labels. As a result of the switch to glass, Shea Yeleen bumped its prices up a bit. Its bar soap is $8, hand soap is $18, and body balm is $22. In total, the brand has 14 SKUs, and its bestseller is Lavender Honeysuckle Body Balm.

Wright says consumers gravitating to ethical beauty are fans of Shea Yeleen. “It’s primarily women who care about the products they put on their skin and hair, and want to contribute to addressing rural poverty and economic development in Africa. That crosses all age groups and races,” she elaborates. “It’s essentially the Glossier shopper, someone who really wants to vote with their purchases, and is politically and internationally aware.”

“This new opportunity with Macy’s is really helping us do a tremendous reset.”

To fund Shea Yeleen’s design upgrade and distribution, Wright has received roughly $170,000 from awards and grants, including involving the DC Resiliency Grant, Small Business Resilience Fund, SBA EIDL Grant, Intermitten 2020 Changemaker Award, PPP and WACIF Co-op Grant. Recently, it garnered a grant from the brand Anastasia Beverly Hills, which dedicated $450,000 to support Black-owned businesses.

A higher-end range called Yeleen Beauty is in the pipeline and expected to be released in 2022. It will showcase an array of African ingredients. Prior to its release, Wright is interested in heightening Shea Yeleen’s retail presence, but not placing it in stores willy-nilly. “The lesson I have learned is being really deep, building relationships and being very successful with a few is the best strategy for us with the management responsibilities and the people power needed,” she says. “And, then, we are really honing in on digital. I’m working to gut our website and create a completely different website. That’s a top priority.”

Last month, Shea Yeleen went live on Macy’s website, and sold out of six stockkeeping units across its products Fresh Shea Hand Soap, Pure Shea Body Balm and Clean Shea Bar Soap in less than two weeks.

Another top priority is fundraising. Wright says, “Right now, I think my financing model will be trying to leverage more grants and more debt financing versus equity financing. I’m actually currently trying to raise $2.5 million, so that’s been my focus over the last couple of months.”

Wright never loses sight of Shea Yeleen’s overarching goal of improving conditions for women sustaining the shea butter supply chain. “It’s not something that only Shea Yeleen can do. We are a leader in this movement, and I’ve been working on this issue for 15 years, but the reality is that women in Africa are still not earning a living wage,” she says, mentioning “yeleen” means brightness and light in the Bambara language spoken throughout Mali. “Why are we using shea butter that is keeping women poor? It doesn’t make sense to me. Shea Yeleen is bringing hope by creating a market.”