Meet Shea Brand, an ethical and Brooklyn, NY-based beauty brand changing the shea butter game.
This beauty brand is using a form of circular design and they’ve definitely got our attention. We’re big fans of Shea’s line of raw and whipped shea butter, lip balm and CDB shea.
As shea butter lovers and sustainability advocates, Shea Brand is right up our alley, but we wanted to know more about the company. So we reached out to the founders of the brand because we had to know more about this operation.
Check out our interview with one of Shea Brand‘s co-founders, Marie Arlet, who gave us some insight into how the brand got started. Let’s jump into it!
FN: How did Shea Brand come into fruition - from concept to reality?
Marie Arlet: Shea Brand is the product of lots of love and two major developments. First, our co-founder Austin discovered that shea butter is by far the best non-steroidal topical medium to help sooth and protect his eczema — something he’d been struggling with (at debilitating levels) his entire life. Second, we took a deep dive into the current beauty market and realized just how many people who, like Austin, stand to gain from having raw shea butter in their lives and on their skin. Also, due to its versatility, there are literally millions of people out there who could replace 2-4 of their skincare items with raw shea butter and stand to live dramatically improved lives.
FN: We got our hands on Shea Brand and absolutely love the lip balm and CBD Shea. Tell us about the beauty benefits of CBD and the process in incorporating CBD into your line.
Marie Arlet: Not only is CBD a great anti-inflammatory but it also helps combat muscles soreness, cramps, arthritis, joint pain and and general bodily tensions. Regarding beauty, one of the things we have found the most true is if you don’t feel good you probably won’t feel like you look good. Being comfortable in your skin is important and that starts from within so wether it’s helping you combat dry skin, eczema or pain we wanted our products to be there for you when you need them. CBD is a miracle for so many people, including our own family members and pets, so our belief in CBD from experience combined with our understanding of it as a sustainable, safe and versatile medicine (Austin spent time growing medical cannabis plants in Colorado and worked with a lab to provide cannabis-based medicine to people struggling with neurological disorders) led us to develop our CBD Natural Pain Reliever in order to expose it’s benefits to a larger market (and without compromising effectiveness).
FN: Shea Brand was born in NYC and is made locally. Can you tell us more about your ethical production?
Marie Arlet: Being an ethical and sustainable business is at the forefront of our ethos as a brand. Not only are all of our products manufactured locally in NYC but all of our ingredients are also sourced very carefully. We make sure all of our ingredients and raw goods are cruelty free but beyond that we insure that they have the lowest negative environmental impact possible and that means we are 100% palm oil free, are conscious of growing seasons, and have developed relationships with some of the farmers and cultivators in order to better understand how we can do our part… For example, our Holy Basil Hydrosol we just launched is grown on a woman-owned US farmed in the early summer months and cultivated to distill into our lovely Hydrosols in June- this means if we sell out by December we won’t be able to restock it until the next summer. That’s the beauty of being in touch with nature and our farmers/manufacturers - there is a natural cycle to life and we reflect that in our products.
FN: Love your playful packaging - how did you come up with this unique aesthetic?
Marie Arlet: All of our packaging is created by our designer-cofounders Krystal Vaquerano and myself. The process begins with free form illustrations that describe a connection between our packaging, our customers, our cities, and our overall mission as a brand. Through our packaging we hope to communicate our love for both the city and the natural world, and to capture the abstractions and forms they share, as well as the struggles between them. We believe that the prosperity of one doesn’t need to happen at the expense of the other. It’s for this reason that all of our products are made with minimal, 100% recyclable packaging and with zero hard plastics, and why we take care to asses all packaging-related decisions against their environmental and humanitarian impact.
FN: What’s next for the brand?
Marie Arlet: We’ve got lots of exciting things in the works but be on the look-out for a new CBD product! It’s got plastic free packaging (of course)!
Want to learn more and support? Check out the Shea Brand’s site. We foresee great things for this small eco-conscious brand making a big difference.
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