Handmade Soap Brand O’LIVE Seeks To Provide Organic Soaps That Can Relieve Skin Problems
Handmade Soap Brand O’LIVE Seeks To Provide Organic Soaps That Can Relieve Skin Problems. O’LIVE was started in 2011 by husband and wife, Sipho and Zikhona Tefu. They started making natural organic handmade soap in their kitchen with a batch of just under 10 soaps so that they could move towards a natural lifestyle and above all aid to help relieve their daughter’s eczema. Shortly after the first batch, Zikhona started sourcing olive oil, and pure essential oils from local farmers, as well as unrefined raw shea butter from Ghana.
In 2013 the company started selling at its local farmers market and were supplying a few stores due to increasing demand. The company also introducedes more handcrafted products in its range and a year later it was supplying more stores as a result. In 2016 Sipho left his job as an engineer so that he could join the company full time and consequently they moved to bigger premises outside the home. What had started as a hobby, the business had now grown from producing a few handmade bars per day to now hundreds of natural organic handmade soaps per day.
It wasn’t long after their move to their current premises that Sipho & Zikhona started taking commissions for private label soaps for other clients. O’LIVE currently produces private label bars of handmade soaps for other companies like skincare brands and olive estates. The company is passionate about reducing the amount of chemicals and synthetics people unwittingly use on their skin, and its mission is to create organic and natural, handmade skincare goodness.
The company is in love with the uniqueness and nature that is the Cape Floral Kingdom as most of its supplies comes from here and some are grown by small-scale farmers in rural communities. The company values the ability to source directly from the growers, as it believes this has direct impact on growing local economy.
