Alaffia

0:00Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Olowo-n'djo Tchala:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. If you are a consumer like myself who loves to choose products that have great quality ingredients and also know that there's some social good behind it from how it's sourced who's making your product this episode is totally for you alohan joe is the founder of alafai which is a social enterprise social impact driven brand that i'm so happy to have on the podcast so thank you so much for coming on thank you Thank you, Kelly.

2:02We wanted to be here.

2:03Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Good. I would first love it if you can walk us through the brand, the concept, and really what you saw an opportunity for to bring to market. Yeah, thank you. I think we want to comprehensively describe what Alafia is and the reasons to start Alafia. we're going to be here for quite a long time. So I ask for forgiveness from you and your audience that I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible because this is lifelong. And Alaphia has been around for the past 23 years. Wow, I didn't realize that. Yeah, we have been around for a while because the problem of the world has been around for a long time.

2:56And we're trying to solve those problems.

2:58Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Right. But just very briefly, I'm actually speaking to you from Accra, which is the capital of Ghana in West Africa. I myself is from Togo. Togo is a neighboring country to Ghana. And in the northern part of Ghana, northern part of Togo, that's where the shea trees grow. And you will see that everything that Lafayette does has to do with shea. I grew up with Deshay, although that's not the reason why we started. I met a Peace Corps volunteer, Prairie Rose, my co-founder, from eastern Washington state, almost 27 years ago. So Rose was in my village of Kabale, and she was an agricultural Peace Corps.

3:48and by that time I already dropped out of school at sixth grade and Rose returned to Washington State to go back to school and I ended up running Rose and went to community college and from there I transferred to University of California in Davis where I studied organizational theory. As I noted we were farmers and that was one of the reasons why I dropped out of school at sixth grade and my mother has eight children my father has 42 children so you can imagine we have we have to do a lot of farming to feed all these wow these hands yes so after studying in in in davis i i began to understand the world beyond and just a village boy if i may say i began to understand the history of america itself i began to understand the unjust that i call the global trade But one thing in particular to answer the questions of why was Alaafia founded, it has to do with my mother.

4:50My mother was an indentured servant, essentially a slave, if you may call it, where she lost her parents just as a very young age and ended up in Benin, a neighboring country to Togo, where she, in exchange for food, she was a domestic servant and came back to my village and married my mother. As I dropped out of school and walked in the farm, I got to really learn the true issues that our woman now say, our mothers truly face. I got really close to my mother. I did everything for my mother. And as an adult, the things I learned from her are quite simple. One is to be humble, which is, and that is because, yes, she has eight of us.

5:40and we ate most often once a day, but yet she would share our food with those that we never met before, those gay that we never seen before. So I just kind of learned that you have to share in the world. She taught us also how to be proud of our culture. She made us wear our bright African colors all the time. And that's all, you know, pretty much we only have one clothes. But, you know, long story short, I just got to understand the humility, the community first, and also be able to be proud of your own heritage. and when I arrived in America and understanding more of the feminist movement all the social movement within America itself and the world and just unjust for the woman in America as well as obviously for the woman in West Africa I thought what can I do and so I kind of look into that heritage of ours.

6:53We made shia butter when we're growing up because we're poor. We couldn't buy oil, so we need shia butter to be able to cook with. And so I thought that it could be a woman making shia butter. And it could at the same time give, I was quite surprised when I arrived in America that people were using product that were actually not healthy for them. It was very shocking because you know when you grew up in togo you think america does everything perfectly so it makes i was thinking okay well we make things traditionally and we don't use chemicals and america is using chemicals um but we need money to keep children uh you know like myself not dropping out schools and our mothers to get out poverty so americans need something we have something.

7:46It really was that simple. And I thought that what I needed to do is to organize our women into cooperatives to make share butter and we'll sell this share butter in America, in women's in West Africa, particularly in Tobu, who have jobs and have a healthier product. It sounds simple, right? But that's, I was just really, I was 22 years old or 23 thinking that my mother said we have to be good kid. We have to be good son and seeing that the world was not a fair place. And really, truly thought that the world was not fair to women, especially when it comes to economics. And I thought maybe I should do something about it.

8:32And, but there is something in addition to what my mother thought is that also was a contributor to the start of alafia and i'll stop there that is i i began myself to really think that africans young african you know some 22 years ago must do something for themselves that we cannot get our poverty if we don't manage and and engage with our own resources within our own terms. So if America is going to use African resources, then Africans need to determine at what price they're going to sell it. Those are where the implications of the fair trade all come about. You see that with Falafia, we talk about fair trade, so on and so forth.

9:20So I'll just leave it there for now. So really the start of Falafia was trying to find a solution for the community that I came from so that we can give better prices for the resources that we're making traditionally and reduce poverty and then be able to provide something to America that we think is healthier as well.

9:40Olowo-n'djo Tchala:You have a great story and you covered a lot. And I appreciate you giving the context, too, because I feel like there's been so much marketing around. This is fair trade or this gives back. And it could very easily just be marketing or nice verbiage of how you're explaining it. But understanding your roots and your why and how passionate you are to connect those dots, I really admire. Not everyone is like that. So I would love to hear about really the strategy and maybe more even recently of a lot of shifts and lessons learned. I know that you have been around for longer than I even thought, but at the same time still.

10:25You really can't see my gray hairs? Yes. Can you see my gray hairs?

10:31Olowo-n'djo Tchala:No, not at all. Mine either. I got your new glasses. I got your new glasses coming. But really, the idea of still this emerging brand too of what you're doing, of coming to the U.S. market and really expanding here, Would you be able to share with us the strategy around how you've been simplifying that story in a way that it's easy for a consumer to just say, yeah, great. This sounds good. It works great. But also making sure that the intentions and the efficacy is also still there. I would love to hear just like how you go about that strategically, but also just your mindset around connecting those two things.

11:22No, certainly. And, you know, even though we have been around for over 20 years, you have to be, you have to continuously be a disruptor, right? You cannot simply, you, I look at Lafayette today. I don't see any different than some 22 years ago. It is every single moment, literally every single day, you're looking, one, how am I relevant to those who are using the product? You talk about strategy. Although 22 years ago, we didn't think strategy is so-called the word that's used today. But you're thinking about that. You think about the customers who are using it and you're thinking about also what is it that you're trying to really solve?

12:15Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Right. The market so-called strategy is what solution are you bringing? And I think brains either in existence or currently that will create innovation are the questions that we have to continuously ask ourselves. Are we solving a problem in the community or are we contributing to a problem in the community? And what solutions are we truly providing for somebody to spend the money? Earning a dollar is not easy to anybody. I don't care how rich you are. So I think that what I try to do, and of course, you have to look at the data, understand the data, and ask yourself relevant questions. I hate to use a word.

13:10What are the consumers looking for? And what type are those consumers? And you position yourself either based on the price or based on the need. and in this case for us we feel those who are using our life here their need is not just price price is important they want the world that's just so what we need to focus the most on is to be true to what we believe on who we are which are our ethical conduct and our ethical conduct are not only how do we treat African women, also how do we create ingredients that are good for those who are using it. Ethics, you know, ethics is a broad that covers all aspects of life.

13:59I hope I'm answering your question. So this is kind of how I looked at it. But there are also very clear things that you are to do, right? You have to be able to look in which market you want to play. That's part of your strategy. Do you want to be in e-commerce base? Do you want to be on physical stores? Do you want to be in box stores? Or you want to be in mass market? All those decisions must be made because they all require different level of capital input. They all require, so I think those decisions need to be made. But if I were to say something, at the end of the day, the question really has come, what are you trying to solve?

14:46But even more importantly, let's put the strategy and everything on the side. I think that every founder, every innovator, every brain strategist, we need to ask ourselves, what is it that I as a person want what do I want to be just like when we ask ourselves what do we want to be when we grew up now we're an adult what do we want to be what is it that speaks to our heart because whatever speaks to our heart I can I can ensure you that you can turn that into a

15:21Olowo-n'djo Tchala:dream that's a good point for you in particular though for your brand what does that look like I think for me is pretty much what I'm doing. Even now, 22 years later, we just launched our Good Soap program. Yeah, tell me more about the Good Soap. Yeah, we just launched. We had our Good Soap program 13 years ago. And during that time, Whole Foods Market has a decentralized system. 11 different regions where we're selling essentially all the different kinds of soap. And we propose to centralize it so that we can ensure that we have ethical ingredients that are part of these soaps. So we launched it and we call it the good soap because we want to do good, you know.

16:11But there was something that was quite unique about it. I wanted, I felt like people, if somebody's making middle income, they should be able to have access to clean product. That's my own personal belief. So we did good soap that was accessible to everybody. And even today, we just relaunched good soap into Whole Foods this week. And it's three, it's five ounce bars of soap with certified fair trade share butter. and you can get these, you can get three for$9. That's, and three - That's great. Five ounce bars for$9. You know, it came, I won't say the names, but even the worst of the worst of soaps in America don't come at that price.

17:01So, and that's it. And the reason we launched the Good Soap is about three years ago, we did not have investors and I brought in investors and our values did not align. We're talking again, what does our ethic look like? Yes, yes, yes. When you bring in investors, their ethics or values are not aligned. I resigned. I left and I chose to believe and stand for who we are. And then I returned last May. And within seven months, we're back into our innovation wagon. Our innovation wagon is to ensure that we are disrupting the market every four months. That's how we operate. That's how we have operated for the past 20 years.

17:48And that's how we're going to operate until all the hairs are gray. And you do that by what do Americans need now? Americans need clean product at affordable price. Everybody is concerned about inflation. It doesn't mean that people need to go back and use more chemical product. It means that we need to provide product that people can afford. And so that's what we're doing. And so I think, you know, the months yet to come, you'll be seeing, you know, good soap with washes and liquid and so on and so forth. And we got nothing to hide, even to our competitors, because we believe that all we have to do is do what we truly is our guiding principles, which is our ethical conduct, and everything shall be fine.

18:40Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Well said. Well said. And I think that's a good reminder, too, because there's a lot of emerging brand founders who listen to this podcast. It's really become a resource and community of the next gen of especially CPD founders. And I love having founders who've been around a few times and have seen the highs and the lows and the in-between to share these lessons learned too. And even your story of bringing on an investor, it didn't align, needing to take a step back, then able to come back. Like that is real life in the trenches, so to speak, of building a business. Right. And you're able to now take a pause and share that.

19:27Olowo-n'djo Tchala:And I really appreciate it because that's where people find the most value in this show. Oh, thank you. And I think it's a lesson for myself. It was the most grave mistake I've ever made in my life. And I know that I'm not the first one, but it is a grave mistake for many reasons. the customers across America that have relied on our life here in some ways have let them down. And the very woman, we're talking about 300 ,000 women in West Africa, that their livelihood was dependent on bringing bad, bad investors. So it's a very grave mistake. There's a human life that I have gambled with and I didn't even do it to get rich or, and we did it for, you know, we ran out of here for over 20 years with our investors.

20:22So it was a mistake, but however, we learned from those mistakes.

20:26Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Right. And what was most important for your audience, I think, and what I have learned from this mistake, that it is okay to stand for the values that you believe in, those moral conduct, right that moral fabric of i'm going to have these organizations that will serve all humanity above all not just the rich and because i still buy that and i didn't go on and now that i'm back the retailers across america are ready and supporting alafia because of that so right I think it is, again, the journey of an entrepreneur or building a brand is not a smooth one. And you will make those mistakes. But again, if you stood by your very reasons of existence, it will work out.

21:32So I just hope that, you know, many people out there because it's a very daunting task these days compared to 20, not to say it was easy 20 years ago to really start a brain. because now the complexity of understanding so-called the whole social platforms and how they work, the complexity of how they pay to play, to be in the stores, the complexity of retail marketing, the data, you have to buy data to analyze data, the so-called distributors. It used to be like you can ship your own product, your own, we used to just go straight to the co-op or straight to Whole Foods and deliver the product.

22:19Well, now it has to go through a distributor. They'll take their cut. Everybody's taking their cut. All of those create this complexity that's just really daunting. And I guess what I'm trying to say is that, yes, we still need more people to start brain because the world has some less of issues that must be resolved. And I think that they can only be resolved by creating enterprises that have moral implications or morality as their fabric, because clearly governments cannot do it, nor that they will do it. So we need organizations to be a solution. And I know that in our lifetime, organizations have been a problem, but small people like us and those yet to be born are going to be a solution.

23:12Olowo-n'djo Tchala:well said and i that's why i also i love emerging brands i do see them all solving their own unique problem and having a unique solution and this collective empowerment of having people have agency over their finances and being their own boss and employing people and the the value that small business in particular plays in a society I think is so understood like misunderstood or not even valued enough yet so I love everything you said I know I have to let you go so you could continue building an incredible brand and economy and just um I I'm gonna personally send this to one of my good friends who I know is going to be obsessed with this episode she loves social enterprises and everything that you stand for.

24:04Olowo-n'djo Tchala:But last question, where can people buy your products? Thank you again. Obviously, you can find us on alafia.com. That's A-L-A-F-F-I-A.com. We are on Amazon. You could also find us in Whole Foods Market, as well as Sprouts or your local co-ops. We believe in the natural. So if you are in any natural stores across America, you'll be able to find us. Incredible. Well, thank you again. Congratulations on all you've done and many, many more successes ahead. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Look for Good Soap and Whole Foods. I definitely will be stocking up myself and I'll see you on the next episode.

24:49Olowo-n'djo Tchala:Bye. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse. As we know, building a brand is not as sexy and glamorous as it looks on social media at times. A lot of those unsexy problems come into play when brands start to scale in retail distribution. Founders are always incredibly excited to see their products on shelves at major retail chains, but they don't realize all the hard work that starts to begin. Retailers and distributors are known for their processes of deducting amounts from invoices. Most of the time, those are totally valid. Promos, slotting fees, free fills, and all the things that brands agree to to be part of the retail experience.

25:38Olowo-n'djo Tchala:But sometimes those deductions are invalid, costing brands thousands to millions in fees. Actually finding those needles in the haystack though and fighting to win back lost revenue, it's a costly, manual, and time-consuming issue. And that's where Glimpse comes in. Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions. Winning brands thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most, scaling their businesses. With a team of in-house deduction experts who come from some of the most successful and profitable CPG companies.

26:28Olowo-n'djo Tchala:And custom built AI with 100 % accuracy and precision. you'll recover money that you never should have had leaked in the first place if you're a brand selling in retail go to try glimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know i sent you thank you again for listening to this episode of the emerging brands podcast it really means so much to me that you listen to this show share it with your friends and support it if you are a cpg food and beverage founder, and you're ready to launch a brand, people want to shop head to withkellybennett.com for the details. And as always, thank you so much for listening, shopping the brands featured on the show and following brands I'm working with.

27:19Olowo-n'djo Tchala:It means so much. See you on the next episode.