We were lucky to catch up with Rashitia & Klive Bertrand recently and have shared our conversation below.

Rashitia & Klive, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Amani & Co. Skincare Products LLC was originated in 2019. We specialize in natural bath products, skin care, and home fragrance essentials. All our products are handmade in small batches by Rashitia and Klive Bertrand. We’re proud to be a Certified Black Owned Business and Minority Owned. Amani & Co. is based out of Conyers, Ga. Our company consist of a husband-and-wife team. I consistently suffer from dry skin, rough patches, and eczema. I constantly struggled while coming up short when searching for a product that not only nourished my skin but was healthy for it as well. This is when I decided to get “in the lab” aka my kitchen and hand craft my own product. I believe beauty and health go hand in hand. When it comes to living a healthy and natural lifestyle, what you put on your skin plays a huge role in your well-being. Your skin is your largest organ! It absorbs everything you put on it. Many hours and lots of research was done for each ingredient to be added to the Amani Skincare line. We pride ourselves on creating luxury organic products. Together my husband and I have created a brand we are not only proud of but built together.

Amani means peace in Swahili. We want our products to be a blissful experience, while creating a Zen type of mood! Everything about Amani was well thought out, including the colors. Teal combines the calming properties of blue with the renewal qualities of green. It’s the revitalizing and rejuvenating color that also represents open communication and clarity of thought. The color turquoise is associated with meanings of refreshing, feminine, calming, sophisticated, energy, wisdom, serenity, wholeness, creativity, emotional balance, good luck, spiritual grounding, friendship, love, joy, tranquility, patience, intuition, and loyalty. Our products are handmade, cruelty free, and not tested on animals. We hope our products bring each one of our customers a Zen and Peaceful type of experience. Our way of life at Amani & Co is RELAX, REFRESH, & REPEAT!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We specialize in natural handmade skincare and bath products. Our star product is our hand whipped creamy body butter. Our butters come in very bright colors and swirled by hand to give a colorful amazing effect to the eye. Were known for our sweet smells and followed by subtle glow that your skin will have. Our luxurious sugar scrubs are just as equally amazing. Our scrubs come in bright colors as well. Perfect for smooth baby soft skin after the first use. If you love using natural soap bars, then you will be in a treat for our wonderful shea butter soap bars. They lather amazing and leave the skin super moisturized.

While most companies use refined shea butter, we only use unrefined responsibly sourced shea butter. This allows our customers to receive the full benefit of using 100% shea butter. We never put harmful chemicals in our products and each product is made in a small batches. We listen to our customers concerns and make changes when needed.

All our products are made with natural or organic ingredients for the nourishment of the body. Our team researched and developed all the ingredients several months prior to our official Juneteenth launch. We take pride in only using premium ingredients. in quality control, customer service, responsibly sourced Shea Butter, and a host of other natural ingredients.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

.We struggled our first year with simple business fundamentals. Our mistakes were quickly corrected and changed for the best. Setting up your business structure correctly is one of the main keys to success. Having the proper knowledge or resources to learn basic accounting, bookkeeping, business management, analytics, negotiation skills, cost of goods, profit margins, and etc. If we could do things differently in the beginning, I would have done more research and development. The overall experience has been a big learning curve for the betterment of the business.

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

When we started our business, we funded our business with our personal savings and credit cards. In our first year of business we started learning about business credit and how to build business credit. I joined a great business group on Facebook and started watching Youtube videos on building. I started receiving funding, credit cards, and tradelines all in my business name. I was able to receive all the capital needed to fund my store front and body butter classes.

Contact Info:

• Website: amaninco.com
• Instagram: amani.co_
• Facebook: amani & co.
• Other: Tiktok: amaninco

Image Credits
All the images are by Amani & Co.