How South African Brand Ashaki Is Improving Women’s Livelihoods Through Haircare

If there’s any proof needed that the beauty industry isn’t superficial, Nthabiseng Duff can provide it. Affectionately called Joy, the founder of Pretoria, South Africa-based brand Ashaki is bottling healing African botanicals to support small-scale farmers through producing healthy hair. As the Black Lives Matters protests started in response to killing of George Floyd go on, Duff calls on the beauty industry to not ignore the Black women around the world who make it possible, from those cultivating ingredients to those buying products in stores. She says, “It is my hope that this is more than just a trend, more than just a moment, for we have been left out on the peripheries for far too long and excluded in important conversations and, at times, those conversations are even about us, even though we are here, we exist, and we are creating as best as we can.” Beauty Independent asked Duff to share the story of how her brand came to be and what she envisions for its legacy.

It all started in 2014 when I endured severely chemically damaged hair, and I decided to take the big leap and fully embrace my kinks and coils. So, I chopped my hair and started on a healthy natural hair journey. I quickly realized the products I’d been using before I went natural were no longer effective and our local stores had very little, if any, product for my natural hair. My transitioning misadventures led to me obsessively consuming online content and learning all I could about taking care of my hair.

My mother Rebecca grew up in the Limpopo province of South Africa, and she shared with me how the marula fruit tree indigenous to South Africa produced an oil that worked well on hair and skin. Having been exposed to different exotic butters and oils in other parts of Africa, and how women used these ingredients pure to their indigenous beauty rituals sparked a deeper curiosity into my own culture. As a modern woman living a completely modern life, it was a wonderfully intergenerational learning that inspired me to fully explore these ingredients deeper.

Ashaki founder Nthabiseng “Joy” Duff

As my kitchen slowly turned into a makeshift lab with me exploring all manner of ingredients, so did my love for formulating and using only organic ingredients as mother nature intended. I then began experimenting with formulas based on these exotic butters and oils, which would eventually become Ashaki’s inaugural collection.

Ashaki grew organically as my hair thrived. Friends and family showed interest in my home-brewed concoctions and would ask me to make products for them. They became my first customers. I then decided to fully embrace this opportunity and left my corporate job behind as a supply chain relationship manager, and dove headfirst into this exciting next chapter.

The brand is a self-funded project I initially bootstrapped from savings and later received grant funding of 50,000 South African rand [or around $3,000 at the current exchange rate]. Fundraising is always a challenge. Startup advice tells us that your initial investment should be from friends and family, but this is not always the most practical to achieve because entrepreneurs are not cookie cutter. Income and wage gap differences affect when and if you can realistically raise funding from your circle. This rings especially true in the South African context because often, as a black entrepreneur, you don’t always have the social capital around you to help fund the big moonshot dreams. It’s more of a hurdle to overcome rather than a definer of where you end up.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was a huge disparity in the quality of life between the women who harvested these popular and often little-known ingredients and the end user in developed countries who used the ingredients in often very luxurious products. It then occurred to me that the beauty industry can be used as a force for positive change, and it’s possible to turn consumerism into quantifiable action to help improve the lives of ordinary rural women by, firstly, buying directly from women-owned cooperatives and, secondly, paying a fair amount for their produce.

“The beauty industry can be used as a force for positive change.”

This became the foundation of our brand ethos to be committed to “beauty with purpose” by going “beyond charity,” phrases we use to display our belief that giving meaningful work is better than charity and has a lasting impact. It’s our small way in helping to create a more equitable world and, hopefully, begin to shift the needle in rural poverty levels. [We help by giving] work to women in need by impact sourcing our core ingredients from women- and youth-owned cooperatives.

Our name Ashaki means “beauty,” and is derived from the Akan language in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. It is inspired by my favorite ancient African kingdom, the Ashanti from Ghana. The brand seal was inspired by Akan Andrika symbols the Akoma, which represents beauty, health and femininity, and the Asase ye Duru, which represents the divinity of Mother Earth. Both of these concepts lie at the very heart of our brand DNA, honoring Mother Earth by using her resources in a sustainable manner and giving meaningful work to women while making the world a beautiful place.

We are currently a small team of women. We have partnered with small-scale women farmers in South Africa, Namibia, Uganda and Mozambique for our core ingredients like baobab oil, marula oil, kalahari melon oil and mafura butter. We pay them three times more than they would usually sell it for. It’s a fact that the majority of small-scale farmers in Africa are women, and it’s also a fact that women reinvest their earnings back into their community to better their lives. We hope, in some small way, we play our part into creating the type of world we want to live in and our customers do, too, because each product sold helps keep this circle of empowerment flowing.

In 2015, we partook in the GAP Biosciences Business Plan Competition, which is hosted annually by The Innovation Hub in Pretoria. We were one of the finalists. The ingredient we competed with was a novel anti-hair loss ingredient harvested in the Northern Cape by women, from which we developed our scalp serum.

Sustainable, organic South African haircare brand Ashaki uses ingredients such as baobab oil, marula oil, kalahari melon oil and mafura butter in its products.

Juggling being a mother of three, entrepreneur and homeschooling during a pandemic proved tricky. Everything changed in March when our president announced that our country was going into lockdown because of COVID-19. Uncertainty was everywhere as we grappled with what that meant. All businesses were closed except for essential services. E-commerce was also suspended as the whole country was required to stay home, and orders dried up.

The upside of the pandemic is that more and more people started to search for products online rather than at traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. This change in buying behavior provided an upswing in e-commerce. After the initial hardship, we were approached by one of the biggest organic online sites in South Africa, Faithful to Nature, with a request to start stocking our products, which I attribute directly to an increased interest in online shopping.

My vision for Ashaki is that we become a household brand, all while staying true and committed to our vision of making a positive impact in the lives of marginalized communities. We hope to foster more retail relationships within our borders and outside. Our legacy will truly be in creating the type of world we’d like to live in by using the beauty industry to uplift the often unseen and unthanked producers of these ingredients, and preserving our natural habitats.