By Amarachukwu Jacinta Abosi
Nobody warns you, when you are deep in pharmacology training, that one day you might find yourself negotiating with a shea butter supplier at seven in the morning before a full shift at the pharmacy counter. Founding Jacimar Organics Therapy Limited has meant learning, essentially from scratch, an entire second discipline, business, while trying to hold onto every bit of the scientific rigor the first discipline had spent years building in me.
Starting With Almost Nothing But a Standard
I did not start this company with significant capital, a manufacturing facility, or business training. What I started with was a standard, a refusal to let a personal-care product leave my hands without the same kind of testing rigor I would have demanded of any compound in a pharmacology lab, and the slow, often frustrating work of building everything else around that standard from nothing. Early batches were made in a home kitchen. Early testing was done on myself and a small, patient circle of friends and family willing to try something before it had any brand behind it at all. Early “marketing” was word of mouth, one satisfied user at a time.
The Capital and Sourcing Problem
The most persistent early challenge was not scientific; it was financial and logistical. Quality raw materials cost more than lower-grade alternatives, and a young company with limited capital faces a constant tension between sourcing the ingredients rigor actually requires and staying within a budget that early revenue can support. Reliable suppliers, ones whose shea butter or oils behaved consistently batch to batch, were not always the cheapest, and finding them took real time and real trial and error, often at real cost when a batch did not turn out as expected because of ingredient variability I had not yet learned to test for.
Balancing a Full-Time Clinical Role With a Growing Company
Throughout this period, I was not stepping away from my clinical and patient-care work to build this company; I was building it alongside a demanding full-time role as a nurse aide and pharmacist’s assistant. This meant the company was largely built in early mornings, late nights, and days off: formulation trials before a shift, supplier calls during breaks, packaging and fulfillment after work ended. It was, honestly, exhausting in a way that is difficult to fully convey after the fact. It was also, I now recognize, the reason the company’s foundation is as rigorous as it is, because everything had to be worth the scarce time I was giving it, which meant cutting corners was never an appealing shortcut, only a false economy.
Lessons Specific to Building in Nigeria
Manufacturing in Nigeria carries specific challenges worth naming honestly for other founders considering this path: navigating regulatory requirements through NAFDAC, managing supply chains that can be inconsistent in ways founders in more established markets rarely have to plan around, and building a customer base in a market where “natural” branding is common but genuine formulation rigor is not always visible or immediately rewarded by consumers who have not yet been taught to look for it. None of these challenges are reasons not to build here. They are simply the real conditions any founder in this space needs to plan for honestly, rather than discovering unprepared.
What I Would Tell Another Scientist-Founder
If another scientist is standing where I once stood, sensing a gap between their training and a business idea, unsure whether the leap is worth making, the advice I would offer is this: your scientific rigor is not a liability to set aside when you enter a commercial market. It is very often the exact advantage that market is missing. Building a business from scratch will still be genuinely hard, in ways no amount of laboratory discipline fully prepares you for. But the discipline itself, the refusal to accept a result you cannot explain, the insistence on testing rather than assuming, travels further than you might expect, from the bench all the way to the label.
Learn More About Jacimar Organics
For more about Jacimar Organics, visit its Instagram and Facebook pages. Additional reflections on my experience founding the business are available in my LinkedIn article.
Image 1
Placement: After “Starting With Almost Nothing But a Standard”
Copy: What I started with was a standard.
Design: A real, slightly lived-in home kitchen shot. Raw shea butter in a bowl, a small scale, a notebook with handwritten measurements. Natural window light with soft shadows, nothing staged-looking. The one line sits small in a quiet corner of the frame, in a simple serif or clean sans font.
Image 2
Placement: After “Balancing a Full-Time Clinical Role With a Growing Company”
Copy: Built in early mornings, late nights, and days off.
Design: A candid photo of a woman in scrubs at a table in early-morning light, filling small jars or labelling products. You can show her from the shoulders down or with her face out of focus if you don’t have a photo of Amarachukwu herself. The colours should feel warm and tired, like dawn light. The text goes along the bottom edge in small type.
Image 3
Placement: After “What I Would Tell Another Scientist-Founder”
Copy: From the bench all the way to the label.
Design: A close-up of a finished Jacimar product on a natural surface like wood or linen, with a glass dropper or test tube resting beside it. Use a shallow depth of field and natural light. The text sits in the soft-focus space. Add the logo very small, or leave it off and let the product label carry the brand.
