On Wednesday, 6th December, five African beauty business converged for the final day of the 2017 Dark & Lovely x SLA Beauty Accelerator Demo Day, which held at OPEN Sandton in Johannesburg.
Over the past 10 weeks, 5 beauty businesses worked with mentors and advisors including; Nneka Keshi, the Digital Director at L’Oreal for Sub-Saharan Africa, Tresor Mpasa – International Brand and Afua Osei, Co-Founder of She Leads Africa. At the event, the 5 entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to a host of industry stakeholders, media and investors for a chance to win cash prizes.
The Demo Day was the closing ceremony of the 10-week entrepreneurship development program which is run to support early-stage entrepreneurs who are building businesses in the beauty industry.
The three business that emerged winners after delivering stellar pitches were Skin Gourmet from Ghana, Beauty Revolution from Nigeria and FreshMe from South Africa.
The first place winner was Violet Amoabeng of Skin Gourmet; Violet is the Founder of Skin Gourmet, a premium skincare line made from raw pure & natural ingredients sourced from the wild in Ghana. Read her interview with BellaNaija Style, here.
The second place winner Louisa Kinoshi the Co-Founder of Beauty Revolution Studio, an e-commerce and digital beauty network for African makeup artists, beauty bloggers, makeup enthusiasts and African women in general. She is also a BellaNaija Style contributor.
In third place were Sherri Rhode, Deveash Jivan and Lendl Rhode of FreshMe a field marketing, sales & distribution company which partners with brands to take their product to market in a customer-centric way.
The other two business owners that pitched were; Mathebe Molise of Beauty on TApp (South Africa) and Aniouvi Gnassounou of Black Beauty Fair (Cote d’Ivoire).
According to Nneka Keshi, Digital Director at L’Oreal for Sub-Saharan Africa:
This program is very important to Dark and Lovely because our brand mission is built around empowering women. We wanted to concretely help and support young women entrepreneurs across Africa. We wanted to make sure that Dark and Lovely and She Leads Africa went the distance and delivered hands-on work with beauty businesses from across Africa. We are incredibly impressed with the quality and scalability of the businesses we’ve worked with.
Congratulations to all the entrepreneurs who participated in the program. We look forward to seeing where these businesses will be in a year’s time!