I am excited to chat with Rahama Wright, founder and CEO of Sheayeleen.com, a social enterprise that is dedicated to empowering women in West Africa and the United States through the production, sale and use of shea butter products. Her story is amazing and we hear not only how and why she started, but also […]
I am excited to chat with Rahama Wright, founder and CEO of Sheayeleen.com, a social enterprise that is dedicated to empowering women in West Africa and the United States through the production, sale and use of shea butter products. Her story is amazing and we hear not only how and why she started, but also her own challenges and successes along the way.
You will find a full transcript at the end of this post.
We chatted about:
* The story behind their products and online store
* Why they chose to use WordPress and WooCommerce
* The challenges they have experienced with their efforts behind online marketing
* How they have found social engagement to be not as easy as expected
* Why they chose to produce their products themselves
* What she feels is important when empowering women through her business
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Transcript
You can also download a pdf of the full transcript here: BobWP eCommerce Show Episode 108 October 11 2017
Bob Dunn: Hey, Rahama, welcome to the show.
Rahama Wright: Thank you so much for having me, Bob.
Meet Rahama Wright, founder and CEO of Shea Yeleen Health and Beauty
Bob: Now this is really cool, this whole thing you’re doing online. Normally, I’d just kind of, you know, give an introduction. But I want to dive right into not only introducing you to our listeners, but, in a nutshell, getting the story behind your site, and how it came about.
Rahama: Yeah, well, our company, Shea Yeleen, has an eCommerce platform where we sell natural, organic, cruelty-free shea butter skin care products, body moisturizers, cleansers, soaps, and lip balms. And every single one of our products is a source of living wages for the women that we source our shea butter from in northern Ghana.
We have a partnership with women’s cooperatives, where we purchase shea butter at a wage that allows women to do things like send their kids to school, buy food, buy medicine. But it also ensures that we’re bringing to market the purest, highest-quality shea butter in its most natural state. That is kind of the brand mission, which I started after serving in the Peace Corps.
Bob: Very cool. I know you work with women in Ghana and this whole thing’s so near and dear to my heart. My wife, in our previous life before WordPress and all this other stuff, she was a grant writer for World Vision, so she traveled to Africa for a month. She was in the sub-Saharan desert, visiting the villages there. She really experienced a lot.
It was amazing. She came back to southern California, where we lived at that particular time, and she said, “Life here seems very unreal.” She just kind of stood in front of her closet looking at all our clothes and everything she has and relating it to what she had just experienced there. And it was like, wow, you know? She was almost in shock for a day or so.
Rahama: Yeah, it can sometimes feel overwhelming. She probably met some shea producers if she was in t...