When Lawani moved to Nigeria in 2014 at the age of 23, it was meant to be for a year or as she describes it, a “moment.” Little did she know that eight years later, she would be helming one of the best-loved beauty brands in the country. Arami began with the premise that one’s body is sacred and should be treated mindfully. Lawani talks to AMAKA about building an environmentally conscious, global skincare brand.
Before Lawani started one of the biggest skincare brands in Nigeria, she worked at a PR firm. It was at a work conference that she was pleasantly surprised to learn about the benefits of shea butter and its moisturising power. This prompted her to research other home-grown African skincare ingredients, such as argan oil, derived from the kernels of the argan nut, an endemic Moroccan plant.
The spark for Arami Essentials came about when Lawani, who had gone natural with her hair, realised the products she used in the UK were unavailable in Nigeria. Consequently, she turned to available natural ingredients like shea butter, African black soap and coconut oil, and her adventure of mixing oils and creating body butters began. When a friend tried one, commented on how good it was and encouraged her to sell it, Lawani who has a background in digital marketing and communications, felt there was a business idea to explore with her new found hobby.
In 2016, while juggling her nine-to-five, Lawani started Arami from her bedroom. Surviving the five-year small business mark in 2021, Arami celebrated its first factory-cum-store in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic hub, and has over 15 stockists within and outside the country.
With its tagline, “Your body is a temple,” Arami translates as “my body” in Yoruba, and the brand is equally concerned about what happens inside the body. On its website, Arami’s approach to skincare is described as one “rooted in simple natural ingredients and wellness traditions from Africa.” And promises that its “beauty essentials are free from sulphates, parabens, phthalates, silicones, mineral oil and other harmful ingredients.”
Mindful of what people put on their body, Lawani is also cares about the environment. According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation of over 200 million people, generates an estimated 32 million tonnes of solid waste annually, 7.8 percent of which is plastic. Unfortunately, not enough is done to manage and dispose of this waste, resulting in environmental and public health hazards.
For Lawani, who wanted to be part of the solution to the problem, it was not enough to be one of the leading skincare brands in Nigeria. She also wanted Arami to contribute to a sustainable way of living, being and beauty. Six months after Lawani started Arami, she introduced a model that encourages recycling, refilling and upcycling—customers are encouraged to send back 10 of their empty (plastic) product containers in exchange for a free gift of choice.
With a dedicated team, made up of over 74 percent women, Arami is pushing African skincare into the world.
Entrepreneurship requires steadfastness
What was the problem you recognised in Nigeria’s beauty industry, which led to the creation of Arami Essentials?
Ore Lawani: When I started Arami in 2016, it was out of a desire to see a change in the standards of cosmetics that are being produced in Nigeria, and to make Nigeria and Africa, a destination for not only great cosmetics ingredients, but actual finished products that are easily accessible around the world. The local cosmetic industry in Nigeria is heavily saturated, but having lived in the UK my entire life, I knew that there was something missing that kept local brands at grass roots level, and I was challenged by it.
What has your entrepreneurship journey entailed?
It feels like an out-of-body experience for me when I think of myself as an entrepreneur. It also feels like a natural extension of who I’m evolving into as Ore. Of course every day is not easy, but the knowledge that I’m doing what God has called me to do keeps the fire burning. I can't imagine doing anything else. Even when it gets hard, I keep going one day at a time. Seeing my team grow and interact with customers makes it worthwhile. I don't regret following this path and I'm grateful for every experience. Talking to other female entrepreneurs is one of the things I often do to understand if some of my pain points are also theirs. It can be helpful to find people who can relate to your situation.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered and how did you navigate them?
One of the challenging aspects of being an entrepreneur is staying steadfast, even when no one around you really gets what you're trying to accomplish or believes you can do it. This was one of the difficult things about running Arami in the early days. So, I sought out accountability and help to make sure I didn't give up. This led me to one of my advisors who would later form part of my board of directors. Having a board of directors for a small business can almost seem premature but it’s something I don't regret. I have been able to leverage their vast wealth of experience with issues such as finances and recruitment, and the frequent board meetings keep me on my toes.
Another challenge I've faced is creating an environment where I can get feedback from my team and make sure every voice feels heard. As a founder, it’s very easy to get caught up in the vision, targets, and big picture that you neglect the people who spend more time with you than with their families. It’s important to me that we have a company culture where people are actually happy to come to work. So, very early on, I engaged HR consultants to understand best practices. We now have an internal HR lead, and it allows us to be more intentional about how our organisation grows culturally.
Social media as a global marketplace
The Nigerian skincare market is heavily dependent on imported products. As a home-grown brand, how did you position yourself to appeal to consumers and create your own space in a highly saturated marketplace?
Vision wise, reaching customers who are used to imported brands is one of the things I saw as a clear challenge with what I was trying to achieve with Arami. I went to the drawing board and asked myself why someone would buy an imported product rather than a local one. The answers I came up with included aesthetics, trust, effectiveness, and professionalism, which informed the ethos behind the brand and the essence of the products. The industry is heavily saturated with local and imported competitors but I believe that there’s an intentionality to Arami that sets it apart; I believed there was room for us. We have been heavily focused on building a community, listening to customers, implementing the changes they ask for and meeting the needs they express, and that’s refreshing.
What role has social media played in positioning your brand?
Social media has been extremely instrumental in building and positioning Arami in the marketplace because that’s where it all started. It’s where most of our customers found out about the brand, leading to a ripple effect of greater awareness and revenue. The first platform used for sales was Instagram, we’ve since evolved into an e-commerce website. Through comments and other engagement, social media also allowed for customer reviews on products to be fully transparent to potential customers, establishing trust and integrity for us.
Not only has Arami Essentials been able to find a market and an audience in Nigeria, you also sell products outside the country. How do you navigate border restrictions and sell internationally?
Our first sales out of the country were from Nigerians/Africans in the diaspora who were still very closely connected to friends or family back home and found us through social media. This has now grown into non-Africans becoming fans of the brand and interest from stockists globally. We have been careful to follow regulations nationally and internationally and we are continually finding out the different regulations for each new market. Right now, we ship worldwide from our website and are in the process of finalising regulatory documentations so we can expand into retailers in other parts of the world. It’s a very exciting time for us—seeing our products organically around the world; we can't wait until we can scale up and reach new audiences like we have envisioned. But I believe in doing things right, even if it seems to take longer this way.
The sustainability factor
Utilising three sustainable stratagems – refill, reuse and recycle – Arami Essentials prides itself on its non-toxic approach to beauty. Why was it important to make sustainability an integral element of the brand?
When I started Arami, I was adamant that one of the things the brand was going to contribute to was sustainability. We have one world and we recognise our responsibility to it, hence why our sustainability programme is called Arami Earth. We started with a recycling program less than a year into the brand that enables customers to give back their empty plastic bottles, incentivised for their next purchase, which we then recycle with our partner.
Then in 2020, we began the move into producing products in refillable packaging like glass. I want Arami to stay true to the eco-consciousness factor of the brand, especially as a small business. Nigeria is still growing in terms of the recycling process, therefore as we evolve as a brand, we want to ensure that we continually find better ways to be sustainable.
We are committed to this as a brand, we consistently share reports and educate our community. We are aiming to get to a place where most of our packaging is refillable/reusable while refining our processes to ensure we are sustainable internally.
"Talking to other female entrepreneurs is one of the things I often do to understand if some of my pain points are also theirs"
In an interview with CNBC Africa, you revealed that Arami's vision is to pioneer the rebirth of natural ingredients from Africa to the rest of the world through modern day innovation. How do you use innovation to improve the effectiveness of your brand’s products?
Let's take our liquid black soap Onyx Light, for example. It’s a very effective cleanser, however, depending on the skin type, can sometimes dry out the skin. Therefore, rather than stop at regular black soap, we added additional ingredients and adjusted the compounds of this natural product to make it suitable for sensitive skin as well.
Africa's ingredients are so healing that they make a great base for skincare products, but sometimes they're all the skin needs, like in our bestselling Glow Oil, which is just shea oil, yet nourishes and seals the skin so well. However for other deep concerns, we love the idea of innovating around our home ingredients with others from around the world.
What are your plans for scaling Arami Essentials and for the future?
The vision is to take the brand worldwide, to every corner of the earth and our expansion plans, which are ongoing, support that. As a strong supporter of the African beauty industry, I look forward to its inevitable expansion and growth around the world. It’s our dream to become one of the biggest retailers in the world as well as be known for creating products that are good for individuals and the ecosystem as a whole.
