There are hundreds of different skin care companies and brands out on the market right now, all promising to magically reverse time and wear on our skin and make our largest organ softer, smoother and healthier than it ever was before. But a lot of these companies, from Nivea to Jergens, use hardly pronounceable chemicals and ingredients that might make consumers wary of buying them if they really knew what was in them.
This is where Stephanie Tsalwa, a first-year graduate student studying systems science and industrial engineering, comes in. Tsalwa co-founded Naledi Body Products in 2016 with her mother, inspired by their Kenyan and Botswanan roots.
“We wanted products where you could look at the label and you could understand what ingredients were being used,” Tsalwa said. “Or even if you didn’t understand one ingredient, there weren’t 10 ingredients that you couldn’t even pronounce. So we wanted to create a product where people knew what was going into it and they’ll know it’ll work for their skin type.”
Tsalwa said the idea for Naledi Body Products came from mixing different scents with shea butter in her kitchen with her mother, Dorothy Tsalwa-Onyango. They thought that if it was possible to make lotions in their kitchen, they could try building their recipes into a marketable business.
“What we noticed was that these skin care lines aren’t made specifically with African skin in mind,” Tsalwa said. “Being East African, living in Botswana where the climate there is very, very dry, we just couldn’t find the right products to work with our skin. So that’s basically where the idea started, wanting to create something that works for our skin.”
The mother-daughter duo also sources as many ingredients as possible from Africa. For example, the shea butter used in her products comes directly from Ghana.
Tsalwa said that affordability was her number-one goal.
“We could have hiked up our prices, but we wanted to make sure that the average household could afford our products,” she said. “And I think that’s a stereotype — if a product is really affordable, it must not be that good. But no, they are really good, but we wanted to make it affordable.”
Tsalwa makes it clear that this company would not be what it is without her business partner, her mother. Tsalwa-Onyango currently handles all of Naledi’s manufacturing in Kenya, even moving from Botswana, where Tsalwa lived until she was seven, to help build the business. As a business partner, Tsalwa said it was initially hard to draw the line between professional and personal with her mother.
“We started off with this mother-daughter relationship, where I’d see that she wants to do something but I didn’t necessarily agree with it, but because she’s my mom I’d go along with it,” she said. “But there has to be that shift where we are mother and daughter, but in this endeavor, we are business partners. If there’s something that we should be doing differently, I have to speak my mind.”
With her mother manufacturing in Kenya, Tsalwa handles the logistical side of the business. From managing the company’s social media presence and exposure to answering phone calls from interested customers when it’s 3 a.m. in New York but 10 a.m. in Kenya.
Though juggling a business in two continents might be difficult, Tsalwa said she manages it by having extreme discipline and strict time-management skills.
“My time has to be planned to the ‘T,’ so if you say an event is three hours long, it has to end after three hours,” Tsalwa said. “Also communication is so big with my mom — letting her know what’s going on on my end and her letting me know what’s going on with her end.”
Another difficulty for her was going overseas for college and the unique challenges being a black woman in the STEM fields can present.
“The first semester [studying at Binghamton University] was definitely hard, being an engineering student and being a black, female engineering student,” Tsalwa said. “There was a lot of pushback working in teams dominated by white males and saying very proudly, ‘Oh, I’m from Botswana and Kenya,’ and the stereotype coming from Africa is — I remember people asking me, ‘How did you learn how to use a computer?’ but it’s something I’ve had growing up in the house since I was 7. There’s also the Africa the media doesn’t show and that’s the Africa most of us are from. I had to fight back against that and work twice as hard and show that I earned my spot here.”
In light of facing stereotypes and prejudice, Tsalwa found it even more necessary to celebrate African beauty.
“Growing up, when I moved to Botswana, I’d get teased a lot for having darker skin than everyone else and for a long time I really struggled with my skin tone,” she said. “And we want to give African women the confidence to feel beautiful in their natural body. We want people to feel like, when they use our products, it’s bringing out their inner beauty.”
Currently, Naledi Body Products is only available in Kenya, but Tsalwa hopes to eventually expand across East Africa and across continents.