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Our story
Seven years on Lokko Road
Balm opened in 2019 with one cream, one shelf and a folding table for a till. Everything since has been added because somebody asked for it, in roughly this order.
2019
One cream, on one shelf
Balm opened at 12 Lokko Road in Osu with a single product, the shea renewal cream, whipped in batches of forty jars in the room behind the counter. Sixty-one jars went out in the first month, most of them to people who lived on the same street.
2020
The shop moved onto a telephone
Nobody could come to Osu that year, so orders arrived on WhatsApp instead, on +233 24 431 7702, and left on a rider's bike the same afternoon. That was the year we learned how to pack a glass jar so that it survives the Spintex road.
2021
The sunscreen, on the third attempt
Two versions left a grey cast on deep skin and both were thrown away rather than sold, which cost a year and most of what the cream had made. The third did not, and Everyday SPF 50 at GH₵ 160 has been the thing people come back for since.
2022
A second counter, in Labone
Labone opened three years after Osu, in a room half the size, and it sells more body butter than the other two counters put together. Nobody has ever been able to explain why.
2023
Bring the jar back
Refills started because customers kept apologising for the glass. Thirty per cent off the shelf price on the shea cream, the body butter and the hibiscus mist, filled at either counter while you wait, and the jars we cannot refill we take back and clean.
2024
Kumasi, and a refill bench with it
The third shop opened in Kumasi so that half the country would stop waiting a day on a bus for a jar of body butter. It was the first counter built with the refill bench already in it rather than added afterwards.
2025
A panel before a shelf
Every formula now goes to a panel of thirty people in Accra, across every depth of skin we could find, before it goes anywhere near a shelf. Two formulas did not survive that panel and were never sold, and the money spent on them is the reason the rule is worth having.
2026
Ten formulas, three counters
Ten things on the shelf, three shops and a packing room behind the Osu counter. Everything is still mixed on Lokko Road, in batches small enough that a bad one costs us a week rather than a season.
The first counter, and the room the boxes leave from
Both of them are at 12 Lokko Road. The shop is at the front and the room is behind it, and everything this website sells has been through both.
12 Lokko Road in 2019, with one cream on the shelf and a folding table for a till. The counter has not moved since, and neither has the shop.
The room behind the counter, where the shea cream is still whipped in batches of forty and every online order is packed by hand. Two people are in here from seven in the morning.
7
Years at 12 Lokko Road
One room behind a counter in 2019, and the same address this morning.
3
Counters you can walk into
Osu since 2019, Labone since 2022, Kumasi since 2024.
10
Formulas on the shelf
Ten. Four more have come off it since 2019 rather than be sold on past their point.
260
Boxes in an average week
Packed by hand in the room behind the Osu counter, most of them before eleven.
Lokko Road
The counter is still there
Number 12 in Osu, six days a week, with Labone and Kumasi open the same hours. Whoever is behind the counter has used everything on the shelf and will tell you which two you can skip.
