She built a beauty business while home schooling children
I ADMIT to pausing a second when businesswoman Tammie Umbel pitched me on her Shea Terra Organics skin- care company a few months ago - and how she built it while raising and home schooling 14 children.
Wow, I thought. How does one do that?
“The purpose of Shea Terra was never intended to be so that I could go out and work,” the 44-year- old mum and businesswoman said. “Whatever I could do while being in the kids’ presence and in their service when they need me emotionally and physically, then I would do it. But I never said I wasn’t going to make money.”
Umbel travels the world finding raw materials for her Dulles, Virginia,-based business that primarily caters to women. Ten employees manufacture products with names like Argan Oil, Shea Butter and African Black Soap.
The two- decade- old company grossed US$ 1.7 million in revenue last year, Umbel said. She turned a profit of about US$ 350,000 in 2016 - and is rightly proud of it.
The company gets about US$ 100,000 a month in revenue online and most of the rest from Vitamin Shoppe, the 700- store chain that carries her lotions and creams.
“I absolutely love what I do,” Umbel said. “I have done everything myself, from A to Z.”
The children - ages four to 26 - go everywhere with her. Not all of them at the same time, of course. Her oldest child graduated from the University of Virginia and is in her last year at Liberty University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Three others are in college studying engineering, cybersecurity and medicine.
Some might accompany her on sourcing “vacations” to Africa, something of a logistical nightmare. Sometimes they just pile into her recreational vehicle (sleeps 10), and off they go to an industry show in Florida.
“It’s not easy,” she said, with notable understatement. “We have to keep our passports up to date, which is a nightmare. Airports are tough. Lots of times, people in airports are jerks.”
Most of Umbel’s ingredients are things I have never heard of, like the argan oil from Morocco.
“In 2003, a Moroccan worker of mine brought a bottle of argan oil to me that his mother had made. I knew immediately I held the oil of the future, although I detested that it sounded like the name of a gas.”
She buys marula oil in Namibia, injecting some muchneeded cash into a former mining community. And Egypt is her source of something called Black Seed Oil.
“I built Shea Terra the oldfashioned way,” said Umbel, who lives on a Loudoun County, Virginia, farm with her physician husband. “Hard work is how. Dedication. I took the money I made and reinvested in the business. No debt. No loans. No investors.”
As the company has grown, Umbel has trained her staff so she can run the company remotely from her Leesburg farm, a halfhour from the factory that she rents for US$ 5,300 ( RM23,850) a month.
If she must go to the factory, sometimes the children come, too.
“I would line them up at tables in the shipping area and give them (school) lessons while running back and forth to orders,” she said. “I would teach them alongside me as I ran the company. Was it difficult? Very. But I was determined to succeed.”
The self-taught businesswoman has had to learn marketing on the fly. Most of it came from roaming the aisles at Vitamin Shoppe. She noticed that retail sales demanded symmetry and continuity. Same colour. All in a line.
“Retailers want shelf presence,” Umbel said. “They want to see five products together, lined up. They want to be able to put a whole regimen on their shelves. They don’t want to see just one piece. If you took 10 different fragrances and 10 different products, you basically have chaos.”
Umbel grew up in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent much of her teen years living by her wits. She was born with a curiosity about foreign cultures, including Asian and Indian.
“I was fascinated by different cultures,” she said. “My best friend was from Korea, and I loved to go to their house and eat their food. I was a strange child.”
She would camp out in front of a black- and-white television and watch public- service ads about hungry children. “I was fascinated by that, and I wanted one day to create jobs for these people,” she said. “I was very conscious of human suffering.”
Umbel, a practicing Muslim, met her husband, Syed Ishaq, at a mosque when she was 16. He was 12 years older and had just arrived from Pakistan, where he had attended medical school. Ishaq is now a kidney specialist - a nephrologist - with Inova Fairfax and Access Medicine.
“He was very handsome and well-mannered,” she said.
She married him when she was 16 and gave birth to their first child two years later. While her husband studied for his medical exams, Umbel in 1990 created a clothing company that was modestly profitable and specialised in ethnic garb from South Asia and the Middle East. She closed it down after she became pregnant with their fourth child.
She smelled - literally - another opportunity in the various international people who frequented the Islamic Centre near Washington’s Embassy Row. — WP-Bloomberg
The purpose of Shea Terra was never intended to be so that I could go out and work...Whatever I could do while being in the kids’ presence and in their service when they need me emotionally and physically, then I would do it. But I never said I wasn’t going to make money. Tammie Umbel, businesswoman