# Alaffia

Fair trade body care - $17M sold over past 12 months

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/alaffia
- Entity ID: wefunder:company:191877
- Last updated: 2026-06-15T23:52:42Z
- Generated at: 2026-06-16T05:00:46Z

## Quick facts
- Backed by Walter Robb (ex-Whole Foods Market Co-CEO) and David Bronner (Dr. Bronner’s)
- Nationwide distribution in 4400+ retail stores Whole Foods Market, Amazon, Target.com, Walmart.com
- 3x YoY growth in 2025, $20M baseline revenue through committed retailer shelf placements in 2026.
- Top 3 brands at Whole Foods Market and 15,000+ 5-star reviews on Amazon
- Projecting $24M revenue and profitability in 2026, on a path to $50M in 2028
- Led by world-class former executives from Whole Foods Market, Amazon, Target & General Mills
- The New York Times, Vogue, NBC News, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar features
- 250,000+ lives impacted in West Africa through access to clean water, healthcare and education

## Active fundraises
- wefunder:fundraise:166972: 4(a)(6) open (USD)
- wefunder:fundraise:154809: 4(a)(6) successful (USD)
- wefunder:fundraise:154808: 4(a)(6) successful (USD)

## Story
Alaffia is category-defining body care. We make clean, effective soap and personal care products used by millions of households, made with Fair Trade shea sourced directly from West Africa. Backed by industry titans such as the Former CEO of Whole Foods Market and the CEO of Dr. Bronner’s. Alaffia is unlocking inventory and fulfillment across new retailers, positioning us to achieve EBITDA profitability this year.Alaffia grew from a single cooperative into a $40M/year business before a successful exit to private equity. Last year, Alaffia’s original founder Olowo-n’djo Tchala reacquired the company and returned as CEO, bringing back the leadership, relationships, and care that built the brand.Today, Alaffia is sold in 4,480+ retail stores nationwide, including Whole Foods Market, Walmart.com, Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Target.com, and leading e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Thrive Market.And now, demand is outpacing supply in the $100B personal care market! A major near-term growth driver is Good Soap. We’re relaunching it with a long term Whole Foods Market commitment. Our product portfolio is currently in the top 3 best-selling for Whole Foods Market’s in body care. Good Soap is accelerating the foundation for broader portfolio expansion across grocery, club, mass retail, and e-commerce on a path to $50M revenue by 2028.Alaffia’s advantage is the DNA of the business. Our certified Fair Trade supply chain is unique. Our women-led cooperatives offer dignified employment and an opportunity for women to participate in the global economy by making shea butter using century old indigenous methods. We reinvest a percent of every dollar we earn back into community projects such as clean water access and tree-planting. Our social enterprise model has impacted directly and indirectly more than 250,000 people across West Africa. This strengthens our regional relationships, deepens our connection to the communities we work with, and supports product quality and a more resilient supply chain.Led by executives from Whole Foods Market, Amazon, and General Mills, we’ve redefined what ethical body care looks like.Since founder reacquisition in 2025, Alaffia’s revenue, velocity, and retail expansion have accelerated across channels. Natural channel trust is now expanding into conventional grocery, and e-commerce, as retailers increase placements in response to strong repeat purchase.The momentum is visible on the shelf. We just launched Good Soap single bars and bath bombs at Whole Foods Market - a six-month exclusive with dedicated branded fixtures. Retail partners are expanding placements, demand is soaring, and our pipeline is full. An expanded Good Soap body wash line debuts Q4 2026, followed by new lotions and body scrubs in Q1 2027.Shea butter, one of the most widely used ingredients in body care, is harvested almost exclusively in sub-Saharan Africa, which supplies roughly 90% of the world’s shea. Tens of millions of women rely on shea collection as a source of income.Yet, the women who harvest, dry, and process the shea receive the smallest share of the final value created.Fair trade standards vary widely in structure, transparency, and long-term commitments. The result is structural imbalance. Communities closest to the ingredient often receive the smallest share of the financial return it generates.Clean beauty and body care focuses on ingredients. Quality is directly shaped by supply chain integrity. When sourcing is extractive, shea is often ultra-refined to standardize and mask degradation. If “clean” is to mean integrity, it must include traceability, dignity, and shared prosperity across the entire supply chain.In most global supply chains, value concentrates downstream, closer to brands, retailers, and consumers. Producers remain price-takers in a commodity system they do not control. That imbalance is structural.Alaffia uses a vertically integrated, Fair Trade supply chain designed to strengthen sourcing control, improve cost stability, and build long-term retail reliability.Our model has become a durable competitive advantage. Deep cooperative partnerships, verified sourcing infrastructure, and embedded retail relationships create a system competitors cannot easily replicate.Value is added closer to origin, creating long lasting empowerment and transparent cost structure. This structure does more than improve operational control. It changes who participates in the economics. At the same time, this allows us to maintain accessible pricing for consumers. We avoid the premium markups common in prestige clean brands.We pay 15–25% above market price for shea nuts, providing stable income to cooperative members who rely on shea collection as one of their primary sources of cash income. Long-term purchasing commitments create predictability in regions where income volatility is common.We dedicate a percent of sales into community-led initiatives, including maternal care, education access, clean water infrastructure, and tree-planting. As revenue grows, reinvestment grows with it.We have demonstrated that national retail scale, operational discipline, and community-centered economics can strengthen one another. Now we are scaling a model that already works.Consumers choose Alaffia because it works. Retailers keep it on shelf because it sells. When shea is responsibly sourced and traditionally processed, it remains unrefined, nutrient-rich, and more effective. Our shea-rich body care is loved and trusted by millions of households.Our formulations are rooted in tradition and hundreds of years of use. The result is clean, effective body care designed for everyday use at an accessible price.In a crowded clean market, most brands are emerging or niche. They demand premium prices or compete primarily on cost. Alaffia is established, nationally distributed, and accelerating.Olowo-n’djo Tchala built Alaffia from $0 to $40 million dollars in revenue. He orchestrated his vision into a nationally trusted clean body care brand that has become a Top 3 Natural Bath & Body brand at Whole Foods Market.In 2021, the company successfully exited to private equity.As often happens in private equity-backed growth cycles, strategic priorities shifted toward financial optimization. While the brand remained strong, long-term alignment between mission, operations, and growth weakened.During this period, founder Olowo-n’djo Tchala launched Ayéya, a premium ethical body care brand, reinforcing retailer relationships and continuing mission-led innovation.In 2025, Tchala reacquired Alaffia.The reacquisition marked a strategic reset - accelerating velocity across core products rooted in the original tenants of the company. Securing retailer strategic partnership and product launches, revenue is forecasted to more than double from 2025 to 2026.Today, Alaffia combines the scale and infrastructure of a national brand, the operating discipline gained through institutional ownership, and the clarity of founder-led execution.Our leadership team has built and scaled brands inside some of the most demanding retail environments in the country, including Whole Foods Market, Amazon, and Target. Collectively, they have generated over $3B in retail revenue, led billion-dollar body care and home categories, and scaled private label and emerging brands from startup to national distribution.This is a team that understands how products win on shelf, how margins are built into the model, and how to expand across natural, grocery, and e-commerce channels. We pair founder-led mission with institutional retail expertise, combining fair trade roots with the operational discipline required to scale to a $100M brand.The global body care market exceeds $100B and continues to grow every year. Soap, body wash, and lotion are replenishment-driven essentials embedded in daily routines across households.Body care is a large, resilient category, and clean and ethical purchasing is the fastest-growing segment within it, expanding at a 17% CAGR through 2033, roughly 2x overall category growth. There is significant whitespace between mass clean and premium niche, creating a real opportunity to grow share in core channels while diversifying into new ones. We see a clear and achievable path to 3% share of market.Alaffia is a repeat-purchase essentials business. Our model combines impact, brand credibility, and operational focus into a system designed to grow over time. Impact is embedded into every unit sold, it’s operational, measurable, and verifiable.Retailers reward our credibility. Whole Foods Market and the natural channel have trusted Alaffia as a category leader for more than 20 years. Retail growth strengthens consumer loyalty. Consumer loyalty reinforces retail expansion. This flywheel is our moat.Retail remains our foundation, led by natural grocery, with expansion into conventional grocery, mass retail, and club. The Whole Foods Market Good Soap relaunch accelerates household penetration and supports higher-volume distribution.E-commerce enhances margin profile, national reach, and demand visibility. As we transition to a brand-managed Amazon model, pricing control and contribution margins improve.Body care is a replenishment-driven category. Growth comes from expanding distribution, increasing velocity, multi-pack formats, focused innovation, and operational simplification.Capital unlocks inventory, strengthens service levels, and supports margin expansion. We scale through a focused portfolio architecture under a single consumer-facing brand. We have three growth engines divided across mission, retention/hero products, and scale. Together, these engines allow us to scale revenue, impact, and distribution, without fragmenting the brand.Alaffia is entering its next phase of disciplined growth. Following founder reacquisition in 2025, the company refocused on operational discipline, core hero categories, and margin expansion. That reset is now translating into accelerating revenue and improving profitability.An in-depth look at growth levers:2025 → 2026 Good Soap relaunch, increased service levels2026 → 2027 Good Soap expansion, recipe and product innovation, club retail channel entry2027 → 2028 Club retail channel expansion, mass channel entryGross margin is projected to expand from 25% in 2025 to 37% in 2026 — a 12-point increase and a 48% year-over-year improvement. This step-change reflects structural improvements already underway, including supply chain consolidation, co-manufacturer alignment, transition to a brand-managed Amazon strategy, tighter trade spend discipline, and increased production scale.Operational leverage is embedded in the model. As revenue grows, fixed costs are spread across higher volume, allowing profitability to expand alongside sales.2026 represents a clear inflection point. After a reset year in 2025, Alaffia is forecasted to achieve positive EBITDA in 2026 as revenue more than doubles and fixed costs are leveraged across scale. Rather than aggressive marketing spend, EBITDA expansion is driven by distribution growth, velocity, and operational focus. The system is designed to surpass $50M in gross sales by 2028 with expanding margins and strengthening cash flow. The inflection has begun.Alaffia’s growth plan is disciplined and phased. Rather than expanding everywhere at once, we are strengthening hero categories, optimizing proven performers, and expanding distribution deliberately.Each phase builds on the last. We reinforce natural channel leadership, scale into grocery and mass, and expand into adjacent categories and selective international markets only when operational foundations are secure. Innovation is purposeful and expansion is carefully sequenced so that infrastructure scales alongside revenue.Clean personal care is a strategic priority for global CPG leaders. Brands that achieve national distribution, retail velocity, disciplined margins, and repeat purchase behavior have consistently attracted strategic acquisition interest.As we scale the next chapter, we are opening ownership to anyone who believes business can create both impact and growth.

## FAQ
1. **Why won’t it let me invest $5000? It says update my income, but where?**
   - Hi John, Thank you for investing in Alaffia! The McBride family is making history. Keith connected this morning about your limit issue. I am glad we were able to resolve it. Thank you for joining our amazing journey!
2. **What is the exit plan (acquisition, IPO, merger, etc.) in which investors will be able to see a ROI?**
   - Most likely strategic acquisition.
3. **I send an e-mail on April 1st using the following e-mail address: service@alaffia.com. Just wanted to make sure this is the correct one. Please advise. If not in your inbox, may be in your spam folder.**
   - Hi Bugg, thank you for your patience. Please resend your note to o.tchala@ayeya.com and we'll make sure it gets to the right person.
4. **Hello, I sent an e-mail to you on April 1st and have not received a reply back. Please advise.**
   - Hi Bugg, thank you for your patience. Please resend your note to o.tchala@ayeya.com and we'll make sure it gets to the right person.
5. **What do you plan to do over the next 6-12 months to convert your current inventory into cash and improve your balance sheet?**
   - Good question. We're focused on tightening inventory to confirmed demand. We have $20M in baseline revenue through committed retailer shelf placements in 2026, which allows us to plan leaner and improve service levels at the same time. Happy to go deeper if useful: o.tchala@ayeya.com

## Team
- Olowo N'djo Tchala (Founder and CEO)
- Isabelle Francois (President)
- Keith McBride (Vice President of Growth & Product)

## Q&A
- Q: Hi my name is Sherwood Neiss. I'm managing partner at D3VC.ai. We are an early-stage venture fund that invests in select RegCF offerings. Yours scored high on our algorithm and we had a chance to look at your offering during our last investment committee meeting. Our team had the following questions we were hoping you could answer: Revenue Reporting Clarification - In your video presentation, you reference $17 million in trailing revenue, however your most recent SEC filing shows $2.1 million. Could you help us understand this significant discrepancy? We'd like to know if 2025 was a particularly strong year, or if there's another explanation for the difference between these figures. CEO Acquisition Details - We noticed that the CEO recently bought back the company. Could you provide context on this transaction? Specifically, we're interested in understanding why the previous management team sold the company and what prompted the CEO to acquire it back. We believe these details would help us better understand the company's trajectory and leadership's confidence in the business. We appreciate your time in addressing these questions and look forward to hearing from you. Best regards, Sherwood Neiss Managing Partner, D3VC.ai
  - A: Hi Sherwood, happy to clarify both. On revenue: The $2.1M in revenue reflects Ayeya’s standalone performance in 2024. Ayeya is a newly launched brand, introduced by the founder in 2023, and these figures represent pre-acquisition results that have been validated through a CPA review. The $17M figure represents trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenue on a combined basis, inclusive of both brands. On the reacquisition: I founded Alaffia in 2003 and built it to $40M in revenue before exiting to private equity in 2021. Under PE ownership, strategic priorities shifted toward financial optimization and the business drifted from its founding mission. In 2025, I reacquired the company and returned as CEO to restore the original vision. Revenue is forecasted to more than double from 2025 to 2026. One note on timing: our RegCF round closes April 30th, so I'd love to connect before then if we can. You can book time directly on Isabelle's calendar here: https://calendly.com/isabelle-francois-ayeya, or drop me a note at o.tchala@ayeya.com. Looking forward to it.
- Q: What is the exit plan (acquisition, IPO, merger, etc.) in which investors will be able to see a ROI?
  - A: Most likely strategic acquisition.
- Q: What do you plan to do over the next 6-12 months to convert your current inventory into cash and improve your balance sheet?
  - A: Good question. We're focused on tightening inventory to confirmed demand. We have $20M in baseline revenue through committed retailer shelf placements in 2026, which allows us to plan leaner and improve service levels at the same time. Happy to go deeper if useful: o.tchala@ayeya.com
- Q: Hello, I sent an e-mail to you on April 1st and have not received a reply back. Please advise.
  - A: Hi Bugg, thank you for your patience. Please resend your note to o.tchala@ayeya.com and we'll make sure it gets to the right person.
- Q: I send an e-mail on April 1st using the following e-mail address: service@alaffia.com. Just wanted to make sure this is the correct one. Please advise. If not in your inbox, may be in your spam folder.
  - A: Hi Bugg, thank you for your patience. Please resend your note to o.tchala@ayeya.com and we'll make sure it gets to the right person.
- Q: Why won’t it let me invest $5000? It says update my income, but where?
  - A: Hi John, Thank you for investing in Alaffia! The McBride family is making history. Keith connected this morning about your limit issue. I am glad we were able to resolve it. Thank you for joining our amazing journey!