How one email broke open a $9 trillion blind spot in Africa – The Oriki story

March 2020. Lagos locked down. So did London, New York, Nairobi, everywhere. Businesses shuttered. Founders opened spreadsheets and calculated how many weeks of runway remained. Joycee Awosika sat alone in her empty Oriental Hotel spa and did something that felt almost naive: she drafted a customer check-in email. 

One response landed that would rewrite her entire business model: “I just came back from the clinic. Everybody was wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). If I can go there, why can’t ORÍKÌ come to me?”

That customer, Mrs Ngozi, became patient zero for what would become Unwind by ORÍKÌ. Within seven weeks, the company had sent therapists into over 700 Lagos homes. But the real discovery came from the data: 70% of those customers had never visited an ORÍKÌ spa before.

“We realised there was a massive market of people who needed services but either didn’t know about us or couldn’t easily access our locations,” Awosika says. The pandemic didn’t change ORÍKÌ’s mission; it showed that access had always been the real gap.

The global wellness industry is projected to hit $9 trillion by 2028. Platforms like Mindbody turned spa bookings into Software as a Service (SaaS). Beauty-tech firms now use AI for skin diagnostics. Yet Sub-Saharan Africa barely registers in industry reports, despite having abundant natural resources and some of the world’s fastest-growing urban populations. While Western markets optimise existing infrastructure, African wellness companies are still building the foundational layer—talent pipelines, manufacturing capacity, distribution networks.

Five years earlier, Awosika had left New York, where she’d been pricing renewable energy deals for a Fortune 100 company, and moved to Lagos to start a botanicals-based skincare line. Nobody thought it would work. “People kept telling me Nigerians might not be your main customer,” she recalls. The first ORÍKÌ spa in Victoria Island was supposed to be a showroom for products. Customers came for facials and kept coming back for services, not hyperpigmentation serums. Retail stores weren’t interested in all-natural skincare. So the spa became the business by accident.

Fast forward to 2020. When other spa owners were still calculating losses, Awosika was running operations from an empty Oriental Hotel location, coordinating mobile bookings through Google Forms and the Fresha web app. 

One therapist became three, then eight. She paid everyone, even when revenue collapsed. “I made a mental note that every team member would be paid each month,” she says. “I don’t even know where that strength came from.”

By week two, competitor spa owners were calling. Their therapists wanted to resign and join ORÍKÌ’s mobile team. Wasn’t she worried about liability or clients being poached? “I said no. We made a commitment, and we were going to keep it.” Not one team member caught COVID. Not one client was infected.

Pricing markets the way you price energy deals

Awosika’s training shows up in unexpected places. She still uses the pricing discipline from her energy desk days—tracking booking patterns, customer lifetime value, regional demand fluctuations. When ORÍKÌ expanded to Kenya in 2023, she built what she calls an “internationalisation document”— demographics, socioeconomic brackets, competitor density, consumer spending power, regulatory landscape, even religion and language. Markets get scored on a checklist. If the numbers clear the threshold, they move.

Uganda came next, ahead of Ghana. The data showed something unusual: Ugandan men engage with self-care services at nearly the same rate as women. In Nigeria, men booking spa appointments still carry stigma; it’s seen as wasteful, effeminate, something you don’t admit to colleagues. Uganda’s market didn’t have that baggage. “We probably have a 50/50 male-female ratio in Kampala,” Awosika says. “We did the research beforehand and noted that men there really care about self-care. So we went.” Today, ORÍKÌ operates 15 locations across Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda. The biggest location isn’t in Lagos—it’s in Kampala.

The business runs on dashboards most spas don’t have. From a single screen, Awosika can track bookings in Nairobi, product sales in Port Harcourt, and therapist utilisation across 15 locations. It’s not AI—yet. Just CRMs and ERPs working overtime, tracking every therapist, sale, and scrub—in a market where most spas still rely on WhatsApp and spreadsheets.

That same systems-first thinking powers ORÍKÌ’s manufacturing arm, Farm to Skin Cosmetics, which now produces for over 100 brands, not just ORÍKÌ. The subsidiary uses its own CRM to track formulations, client orders, and ingredient sourcing. “Tech is the backbone of everything we do,” she says. “CRMs, ERPs for inventory, digital intake forms for medical data—we use them to standardise and replicate.”

Outside the company, Awosika occasionally channels that expertise through a small consulting outfit, helping other founders document and structure their operations. But her focus remains firmly on scaling ORÍKÌ’s ecosystem.

When you can’t find talent, you build it

By 2021, ORÍKÌ was trying to staff a Port Harcourt location and couldn’t find five certified therapists. Existing beauty schools didn’t keep graduate databases, so Awosika built her own solution: a vocational institute. The first class was unveiled with Lagos State’s First Lady officiating the opening.

Today, it operates in Surulere—relocated from Victoria Island after data showed most prospective students found the island too hard to access. Graduates now fill ORÍKÌ locations, power its Unwind network, and start their own practices, closing a gap the wider industry hadn’t yet addressed.

That same discipline guided her decision to join the Cascador program in 2023. “I have an insatiable desire for knowledge,” she says. It was more about refining structure. When Cascador later opened a debt funding window, she pitched—and ORÍKÌ won the Best Pitch Award in May 2025. The capital is fueling eight new locations; two are already open, with VGC launched last week and another location outside Africa before the year’s end.

Today, ORÍKÌ employs 272 people, distributes products in six countries, and runs six haircare centres under the Anoint brand. Year-over-year growth is above 100%. But the numbers Awosika cares about most are proof points—like how African botanicals can power clinically tested results, or how ORÍKÌ’s manufacturing arm now meets international standards comparable to leading Asian beauty markets. Those outcomes validate years of building local capacity from scratch and point to a larger goal: showing that African wellness can compete globally on both quality and scale.

Those discoveries feed the long play: turn product credibility into distribution and then into financial products that deepen customer value. The wellness hub, launched last year, adds shared infrastructure for other founders, so the market grows with ORÍKÌ rather than around it.