Three African beauty entrepreneurs win the Dark and Lovely/SLA Beauty Accelerator programme

For the first time, Skin Gourmet from Ghana, Beauty Revolution from Nigeria and FreshMe from South Africa went home as the winners of the 2017 Dark & Lovely and SLA Beauty Accelerator Demo Day, which held at OPEN Sandton in Johannesburg last week.

The Demo Day was the closing ceremony to the 10-week entrepreneurship development program, which is run to support early stage entrepreneurs who are building businesses in the beauty industry. Over the past 10 weeks, five beauty businesses worked with mentors and advisors including; Nneka Keshi, 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 five entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to a host of industry stakeholders, media and investors for a chance to win cash prizes. 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 and natural ingredients sources from the wild in Ghana.

The second place winner was Louisa Kinoshi of Beauty Revolution Studio. Louisa is the Co-Founder of Beauty Revolution Studio, an e-commerce and digital beauty network for African makeup artists, beauty bloggers, makeup enthusiast and African women in general.

In third place were Sherri Rhode, Daveash Jivan and Lendl Rhode of FreshMe. The trio are Co-Founders of FreshMe, which takes beauty brands to salons and brings people to brands in an informal salon market.

The other two businesses 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 SLA 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”.

SLA is a community that helps young African women achieve their professional dreams and remains committed to encouraging young African women to rise to the top of their various career paths and take charge to attain their professional ambitions. By providing and creating more opportunities for their community, SLA will continue to connect women to business leaders and experts in the various industries available.