How Tegbe transitioned to building skincare brand with African organic ingredients

Christina Tegbe, founder “54 Thrones” has been breaking barriers with her skincare brand and highlighted her journey and the impact of her business at the GTCO Fashion Weekend 2025 in Lagos in a masterclass session Title: The Science of Ritual: From Heritage to Results — The Future of African Beauty.

Tegbe narrated how 54 Thrones was launched in 2016, and that the brand celebrates Nigerian heritage, featuring plant-based, organic ingredients ethically sourced from Africa. However, Tegbe was led by the moderator into questions and answers in order for her to make the audience understand how she started her journey and the impact of her business, writes Editor Gentechnews, Tony Nwakaegho. Excerpt:

 

Take us back to the beginning. Like, what happened? Why did you start 54 Thrones?

 A year before that I had quit my job, but it was a good thing and so I visited Nigeria for the first time in 2012 and I met my maternal grandfather for the first time also. And I was working as a corporate consultant and I didn’t feel fulfilled at all. I felt like I needed to learn more about my heritage. I spent four times here. From there I went to Ghana, went to Morocco, and went to Egypt. I just kept traveling all around Africa. But the moment where I said, you know what this is to me, big, is when I was in Morocco, I was an American and I was in a suit. And I saw women sitting on the floor. They were grinding these nuts to a paste. And they were making armandes. I had never seen that. But I do use argan oil in products. And so I knew that it was good for your hair. And so I was like, I need to see more of this. I was fascinated. I asked them to take me where they actually grow the nuts and they make the oil.And so I went to Ayia Napa and I saw the facilities. I saw the women that were making argan oil. And I said, I took pictures. And back then I used to be on Facebook. This was like 2015. And hundreds of women messaged me. And so I was like, this, I think I have a good idea here.

Okay, so what made you actually start 54Girls?

Like what was happening in the beauty industry at that point? And I thought, you know what? I’m going to start this thing and it’s going to be fantastic. So I launched 54Girls in 2016. And at that time, there weren’t a lot of African beauty brands. I remember there was Shea Whisker and there were other brands that had African ingredients. But no one was really telling African stories.  No one was really speaking about the ingredients, speaking about the beauty rituals, the tradition, the culture, and where that came from. And so as I was traveling around all over my cousin, meeting people, meeting the women, who were making Shea butter, making argan oil, I had an idea that I said, you know what? I’m going to start a brand and I’m going to work with all the women and men that I have met over the years. And that’s what really made me start the brand. I wanted to tell my own story.  I think now it’s different from back then. People saw Africa as one country. They saw it as a country. They didn’t really understand the beauty of it. And I had traveled so much around Africa that I wanted to show them. And I said, you know what? I’m going to start a brand and I’m going to show these beautiful stories and do it in a really authentic way. And that’s how I started the brand.

How has being Nigerian affected or inspired how you create stuff and how you lead the brand?

So my father is Nigerian and my mother is Black American Creole. So she’s from Louisiana. And so I really grew up African American. I grew up in Texas. But that duality really gave me a different perspective. This is giving me autism. So I grew up with, I feel like I got my entrepreneurial spirit from the Nigerian side. The boldness, the ability to take risks. But my mother was a hairstylist when I grew up. And she had eight sisters, and they all were hairstylists. So I grew up seeing a lot of big, bold, beautiful women that their skin always smelled good. Their skin was always shining. They were very humble. They were very unapologetic. And that is really what informed me. And I think that informs how I create and how I created the brand. And so when I would travel to Africa, I would pack a suitcase, and then I would pack an empty suitcase, and I would put them together. I would come here. I would buy shea butter and oils. And I would pack my suitcase and take them back home to Texas. And I would roll up my t-shirt, and I would be mixing things and making products and selling them online. And I really thought, like, this is the best way to start a brand. So I think the fact that I was so naive that I didn’t know, like, how things went, I didn’t know what couldn’t work, that’s what helped me the most because I believed it could happen. And so that mixed with, you know, hard work and really doing research helped me launch the brand and be successful.

Has your vision evolved from the beginning until now?

Yes. My vision has evolved and changed a lot. When I look back at the brand 10 years ago, it looks completely different. Completely different now. But I think it’s getting more exposure, understanding the beauty market more, understanding the global beauty market more has helped the brand evolve. And we’re excited about that.

What inspired you to see this global shift after the practice?

 Again, I think, I feel like we as Africans, we undervalue what we have in common. I think we kind of think the brand has always been here somewhere else. But Africa has the most biodiversity in the world. So we have everything that we need here, but we’re always looking to the West, for products, for beauty, for reference. And so I really wanted to show that Africa was beautiful. I wanted to show the traditions. I wanted them to know authentic stories. And I was going to do it in a very niche way. And I felt like if you got it, you got it. And if you didn’t get it, so what? So I just felt like I was going to take five or eight different breakthroughs when I started a brand. I mean, when I launched a lot of African brands, the packaging was like black or white. It was very minimal. It was very stark. And our brand has a lot of color. So I wanted to be different. And being different helped me stand out.

What do you mean by when you say that African beauty is science, just undocumented?

 Everything is oral. It’s oral. It’s an oral tradition. But at the same time, the rituals and the traditions that our grandparents and grandmother, your mother shared with you, that’s science. And I don’t think we look at it that way.  The only thing that’s missing is clinically validating these things. But our grandmothers are technical. They made out of baby things in labs. The things they told you to put on your belly when you were pregnant. Those things work, so they work. And so I think when we think of African ingredients, we just want to talk about how natural they are. But they’re also very scientific in their implications. And I think moving forward, we’re going to get into that. But moving forward, we have to pay more attention to the science behind these ingredients.

You said you travel around Africa a lot. How do you decide which products or which rituals or which procedures from the 54 countries to pick and use in creating your products?

I have traveled around Africa a lot, so I decide which products or which rituals or which procedures from the 54 countries to pick and use in creating your products. So I look at the data first because I don’t want to use fake products to make products. I look at the problem areas. I think I read the complaints and I hear what people are suffering from. So I start with the problem. And then I go and I research and see if there is an African plant or an African ingredient or an African ritual that can solve that problem. So once I’ve identified that, I’ll start thinking about the product. I’ll call up the people that I’ve been working with for the past decade. You know, they grow that ingredient. I want to learn about it. And most times, I’ll actually come to wherever it’s grown, whether it’s Nigeria or Ghana or whatever, and I want to sit and learn. I really want to be respectful and have an authentic approach when we make products. So that’s what’s most important to me. So after I’ve learned what it’s for, what the history is, I do like to sit back and let the idea kind of breathe and get some air. A lot of what we do is all about business, but we can’t forget the creative part as well. So I try not to neglect it. Like, I think about how the products are fueled, how I want it to smell, that whole product experience. And so that’s how I start. I start with the product, and then I work back with the product, and then I work back with the product that actually works for that product. That’s a very technological way to go about it.

Have you passed out any misconceptions about your African products or African life-form materials in your journey, because, you know, there are lots of people who are like, oh, no, don’t use this shit, wasa?

This shit wasa is not good. Don’t use it. My mom puts shit wasa on everything. If she could put shit wasa on top of my margaritas, she would. She thinks that’s the answer to everything.

But is there, like, are there misconceptions about different products that you come across throughout your journey creating this brand?

Yes, so I think the biggest misconception is that African ingredients are not in our business. Earlier this week, I was at ULTRA, and I was working with a cosmetic chemist there, and she called her lab Africa’s Beauty Innovation Lab. And she was sharing with me some exciting things. She was looking at shea butter and finding ways to extract peptides from shea butter. And also doing really exciting things with oat bran. So I think when we think about African ingredients and African beauty rituals, we forget that they’re actually science and innovative. We lean too much on folklore, and we forget about science. And I’m guilty of it, too. When I first started the brand, we talked about the heritage and the culture and the folklore and all of that. We didn’t talk enough about the science and education behind that. So I think that’s the biggest misconception, that African ingredients are not innovative because it’s natural. So I guess, before you go deeper into that, you have to.

So how do you bridge the gap between the product and science? How do you innovate? What does that look like behind the scenes as people grow?

First, I want to ask the audience a question. As we’re showing here, how many of you use K-beauty, Korean beauty? K-beauty products? K-beauty products. We’ll keep at it. But it’s interesting because Korean beauty was not always a thing. Korean beauty was dismissed as too niche, that the ingredients were too weird, they were too strange. So people were not using K-beauty until the early 2010s. And the reason why that happened is because around that same time, something that the Koreans call Hal-yu, and Hal-yu basically means Korean wave. And so that’s when everyone started tapping into K-pop, K-drama, and Korean beauty hopped on that wave. And if we look around right now, what’s happening with Africa? Afro beats, Afro music, Nollywood, all of that is happening right now. And so K-beauty also has to do the same thing that K-beauty did. And they invested in performance, they invested in data, they invested in clinical testing, and they invested in aspirational storytelling. So they made us, they were using ingredients like ferments and ginseng, all these crazy Rice water. It’s rice water. Snail mason. And if you don’t remember anything from my speech today, remember that marketing is everything. So the Koreans were smart, and they learned how to position and how to package K-beauty for the world. And I think Africa should follow the same example. We have to package, we have to market, we have to do our clinical, we have to invest in R&D. And those are the things that we’re not doing. And what I’ve picked from what you’re saying now is that clinical testing is key.