LOVE AT FIRST SLATHER
A lucky discovery inspired the creation of African skincare brand Savane
by Bambina Wise
Wanted Magazine, April 2011
“Love at first slather.” So confesses Jennifer Peters as she recounts how Savane, the organic skincare range she started with her business partner, Stephan Helary, came into existence.
“This was in 2006, and we were out in the Namib Desert, Stephan and I and a group of friends, on a two-and-a-half week trek,” she says. “I had lugged with me at least a thousand dollars worth of moisturisers, serums and oils, which I applied religiously, yet my skin seemed to be getting dryer by the day. Stephan, on the other hand, was brown, smooth and shiny all throughout!”
Helary’s secret was golden marula oil packaged simply in a plastic bottle. A Madagascan-born Frenchman with an extensive career in conservation, agriculture and veterinary medicine — he is an international expert on rhino nutrition — Helary was raised with a reverence for nature.
“Marula oil was already then hard to find,” says Helary. “You had to go directly to the source, in north central Namibia.”
One dab was all it took to get Peters hooked. “It was an aha! moment,” she says. “Not just because it kept my skin wonderfully hydrated the rest of the trip, but because it was exactly what we had been looking for.”
Helary and Peters, friends for over a decade, had both been contemplating a career change. Peters, an American national and Harvard graduate with a degree in anthropology, had spent the last several years in southern Africa, working with various NGOs, focusing on rural development and women’s health. She and Helary shared a passion for conservation and sustainability, as well as an increasing disenchantment with development work.
“It wasn’t that we didn’t like the work we were doing,” she explains. “But we both were, individually, coming to a point where we began questioning what we were doing.”
Perhaps it was the inevitable tempering of youthful idealism with reality. “We still wanted to continue to do something that would help the rural communities and the environment,” Stephan adds, “but we were looking for something more practical, more sustainable and more fulfilling.”
Most people might have ventured into Fair Trade coffee production, designed a clothing collection or launched a home accessories line. But Helary and Peters decided to develop a luxury organic skincare range, even if neither of them had a cosmetics industry background.
“Well, I suppose I did, in a way” murmurs Helary, the more reserved of the two. He studied chemistry and botany, and grew up understanding not just the powerful properties of plants, but their potential for commercialisation with minimal impact to the environment and maximum benefit to the community.
Peters, on the other hand, brought to the equation her marketing savvy, and, as clichéd as it sounds, an all-American sense of adventure and optimism.
“We’ve been called naive because of our desire to make skincare products that really work, using ingredients culled from all over Africa that were Fair Trade and certified organic as much as possible. And we had to get everything right. We wanted a line that was of the highest possible quality, and ethical at the same time,” she says.
The name they chose for their line was Savane, the French word for savannah, which, while an obvious nod to Helary’s French heritage, “sounded just right”, according to Peters. “It’s soft and nice and beautiful. It didn’t sound particularly ethnic, but it seemed to embody what we were about. When you think about it, most of the ingredients we used came from the savannah.”
Helary adds that they had “an intrinsic understanding of what we wanted the brand to be, but actually creating it was something else”. For the next four years, the duo worked with a top organic formulator in Durban, formed partnerships with like-minded organic suppliers, got the stamp of approval from organisations such as Phyto Trade and Ecocert, the world’s international organic certifying body, sent samples all over the world to test the products and designed packaging that was recyclable, in line with their principles. “And just as we were ready to launch big, the market collapsed,” recalls Peters.
So Helary and Peters regrouped, remapped their strategy and launched Savane in SA late last year, selling their range of six cleansing, toning, moisturising, exfoliating and nourishing products by word of mouth or low-profile direct sales events. This month they score a triple coup — designer Karen Ter Morshuizen of Lunar will stock Savane at her Johannesburg and Cape Town boutiques, Hanneli Rupert of Merchants on Long in Cape Town will carry the range, and organic beauty guru Melissa Christenson, who created Aveda with Horst Rechelbacher in the 80s, has included Savane in her natural and organic beauty e-boutique.
WANTED Magazine interview with Jennifer Peters and Stephan Helary, April 2011