Usawa Grand Opening at Los Mercados
For the first time in years, I heard from an old client and friend from Vallarta Tribune days, Kassiano Smith, a Jamaican-born, internationally famous singer, entrepreneur, environmentalist, healer, and dad. He wanted me to know about the launch of his daughter’s new storefront. I first met Kass’s daughter, Tashara, about 10 years ago when she participated in Act2PV’s Voice of Vallarta; when those weeks of competition were over, we lost touch until yesterday.
The often painfully shy teenage girl is gone and replaced by a lovely, fit, confident businesswoman who is completely bilingual and, more importantly, bicultural. A hobby to augment her income while studying foreign relations at university kept calling her back.
Two years of hard work and experimentation, building her own production center adjacent to her parent’s home in El Nogalito where Tash grew up in the jungle, have paid off, and she is now ready to introduce her online business to brick-and-mortar and the public.
Tash presents her soap and candle-making business Usawa (Swahili for Balance; her dad was just in Kenya). Tash uses environmentally-friendly organic products ONLY and grows all the roses, herbs, spices, etc. that she needs in the surrounding hills on the family farm. Her mom helps, as Tash says wryly, “I’m very good at dehydrating the stems and flowers, not so much with the watering beforehand!”
Usawa’s production center smells divinely spicy and pungent with the mixture of pure essential oils and loaves of soap, curing for at least 30 days, slowly integrating fragrance, glycerin, and natural colors, becoming hard and long-lasting. Tash has developed shower bombs – the big crystals release fragrance into the steam – great for those of us who don’t have a bathtub. Her line also includes bath salts, hair care products, and lip balms, and candles, of course, in two sizes.
The packaging is earthy, cardboard and brown paper, always putting Mother Nature before commerce.
Usawa opens at Los Mercados, Aquiles Serdan 265, Local C, in the Zona Romantica, on Friday, January 17, at 4 pm. You will be able to sample ‘Candle Drinks’ made with the same ingredients as Tash’s candles. If they taste only half as good as they smell, they will be delicious! Another very cool idea – you will be able to cut off a skinny piece of soap to try and buy by weight, so much better than investing a bunch of money and finding out you are not that fond of the fragrance.
Usawa is innovative marketing, good for the environment, great for your body, and all-natural by Tash. I will see you at Los Mercados, one week today for the Grand Opening of Usawa.