THE CHALLENGE: Today’s beauty and wellness aisles brim with products that promise glowing skin and lustrous hair yet 80% of them rely on ingredients flagged for health or environmental concerns. Consumers aren’t fooled: 85% say they’d pay a premium for proven efficacy and 75% demand sustainability. Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s rich tapestry of indigenous plants lies untapped, and women smallholders in its biosphere reserves struggle to turn centuries-old botanical knowledge into a sustainable livelihood. The result? Global brands gobble up raw ingredients with scant regard for traceability, and local communities miss out on value-added income. Tsehaye recognized this double bind: eco-conscious consumers starve for truly green, high-performance oils and teas, while female farmers in remote Ethiopian valleys lack the supply-chain infrastructure to bring their bounty to market.

THE PROCESS: Armed with a background in social-impact investments at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and fuelled by childhood weekends roaming Ethiopia’s forests, Tsehaye founded Chakka Origins to rewrite the script. Their market research included virtual and face-to-face individual and group interviews with more than 50 experts across market players (at leading trade fairs such as inCosmetics), technical experts (organic chemistry, biodiversity, biology), stakeholders (farmers, government stakeholders, implementation partners). This enabled comprehensive inputs on the range of the total supply chain for the business, both at the early stages of venture building and through ongoing annual reviews to ensure up-to-date insights were captured. Tsehaya built an end-to-end supply chain that sources directly from over 2,000 trained women smallholders in UNESCO biosphere reserves, ensuring organic, regenerative agroforestry practices at every step. In 2023, a major rebrand and two back-to-back showings at inCosmetics Paris and Barcelona cleared the runway for direct-to-consumer launches in the US, UK and France and bulk exports to industry giants. By controlling traceability and leveraging indigenous species with up to three times the active compounds of conventional oils, Chakka Origins delivers premium natural oils, herbal teas and food-grade extracts. Revenue streams flow from D2C sales and B2B contracts, while partnerships with local cooperatives weave social equity into each bottle.

THE RESULTS: What started as a one-woman mission is now a 14-person enterprise with over 500 happy customers vouching for batch-to-batch consistency and longer-lasting performance. Chakka Origins has carved out a slice of the $20 billion essential-oils market, tapping into US and UK segments growing at 7% and 9% annually respectively. Beyond sales, the venture empowers women: more than 2,000 smallholders have received agroforestry training, unlocking new income streams and reinvesting in their communities. As the first vertically integrated specialty-ingredients company out of Ethiopia, Chakka Origins is setting a new standard for ecological stewardship and traceable quality – proving that doing right by nature and people isn’t a niche, but the future of beauty.