Growing up in the 1990s in Maryland, Naa-Sakle loved love–from Shakespeare to When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, and the cult classic 10 Things I Hate About You. As the child of divorced parents, lifelong love stories inspired her, and when she became a single twenty-something in New York, she wondered, "Is this the elevator ride one where my love interest rides up eleven extra floors just to be with me? Does my forever mate work just around the corner?" And while he did, and the two have a fourteen-month-old Amele, the love story behind the Eu'Genia Shea is between generations of women in her family.

Her parents had immigrated to the United States from Ghana in the 1970s. In 2000 when Naa-Sakle went to boarding school, newly single, Eugenia moved back to Ghana to take care of her mother, Grandma Sunshine, a midwife in colonial-era Ghana who used shea butter in her practice for pregnant moms and babies.

Eugenia founded a shea butter distribution business and became the president of the Global Shea Alliance, an organization that advises governments and NGOs about shea butter best practices. Na-Sakle was apprehensive at first, "My mom quickly began to think of shea the same way the mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding thinks of Windex." But helping others allowed Eugenia to take her mind off her divorce and Grandma Sunshine's health and get her groove back. 

Soon, Naa-Sakle's turn to both catch the shea butter bug. Eugenia was diagnosed with stage IV colon and told she had a few months to live. Her daughter started to help with the business while in business school, but when she fell sick with bacterial meningitis, Naa-Sakle left finance and took over her business. Eugenia is fully recovered(!) and now lives with Naa-Sakle and her young family, but in helping run the company, she "realized that even though there are a million products that have shea butter in huge font with pictures of leaves, trees, and nuts all over, when you flip over those containers, shea is maybe the 20th ingredient. So our motto is the more shea butter, the better, but not all shea is created equally!"

The distribution business turned into what is now Eu'Genia Shea. It's beautifully packaged with embossed labels in gold tins as a nod to the Women's Gold harvested by their team of 7,500 female nut pickers in Northern Ghana. Each formula in the line is filled with a sustainably sourced blend of all-natural ingredients. The first ingredient is always shea butter, followed by other plant-based ingredients: shea oil, grapefruit or lavender essential oils, moringa oil, and baobab oil making it highly efficient for daily moisturizing, reducing the appearance of scarring, eczema, psoriasis, and stretch marks.

Eugenia, Naa-Sale, and Amele are all under the same roof these days, and while it's too early to know if Amele will follow in their footsteps, she's started to grasp the brand's raison d'etre, she recently learned how to say "Mama."

In honor of Black History Month, we’re Celebrating Black Stories throughout the month of February–and beyond. For every dollar spent at Maisonette on a Black-owned or Black-founded business during the month, we will donate a dollar to50 States 50 Books, an organization run by Charnaie Gordon, the founder of Here Wee Read.