Meet Susana: The Chairwoman Who Answers for Every Batch

Every skincare brand on earth claims quality control. Most of them mean a document.

Ours means Susana Sampamdoug. She chairs the cooperative, she oversees production, and she has no professional interest in flattering her customer. Everyone calls her Suzy.

What chairwoman means in this village

It is not a ceremonial title and there is no boardroom.

Suzy keeps an eye on daily operations and makes sure the group runs smoothly, which in a cooperative of more than thirty women who decide everything by consensus means talking to all of them. Not a majority of them. All of them. Nothing passes at our cooperative until the whole group agrees, and somebody has to carry that conversation through pricing, membership, earnings and the awkward question of what happens when a batch falls short. That somebody is Suzy. How the consensus system works, and why I stopped calling it slow, is in Love at Our Shea Butter Co-op.

Her own description of the job is shorter than mine:

"I keep an eye on our local operations, making sure the cooperative is running smoothly. Offering the best, highest quality West African Shea butter for our clients is our priority. I promise that the Shea butter we ship out of our cooperative is of the highest quality possible."

That promise has her name on it in a way that no certificate ever manages. She lives in the village. If a batch disappoints someone in California, she does not get to be a department. She gets to be Suzy, who let it out.

The part I did not see coming

Suzy is married to Victor, the chief of our village. They have three children together.

So the woman who runs the Shea butter operation and the man who is responsible for the village are the same household, and between them they look after nearly everyone here. A power couple, in the least LinkedIn sense of that phrase: no titles printed anywhere, just two people whose day is mostly other people's problems.

I want to be clear about the direction of that authority, because it would be easy to assume. Suzy is not the chairwoman because of who she married. She is the chairwoman because she knows butter, she knows every woman in the group, and the group put her there. Being the chief's wife adds reach. It does not add credibility with thirty women who make Shea butter for a living and can spot a bad batch from across a room.

Tradition is not a museum

Here is the line of hers I quote most often:

"We are proud to keep our centuries old traditions alive and we know that we are able to do it only thanks to our clients who appreciate natural products."

Read the second half again, because it is the whole business model. The tradition does not survive because someone protects it or writes a grant application about it. It survives because there is a market for what it produces. If handcrafted Shea butter stopped selling, the skill would quietly become a hobby, then a memory, and the machines would win by default.

The eight steps the women refuse to mechanise are here: how our Shea butter is made.

The unglamorous half of chairing a cooperative.

A mother of three, on purpose

"I am a mother of three, so it is important to me to be a role model for my children and also see them succeed. I wish the same for every woman and their sons and daughters in our village and in the world."

Note that she includes sons. This is not a woman running a women's cooperative because she thinks men are the problem. She is running it because Shea butter has been women's work and women's income in West Africa for centuries, and she would like that income to be real money.

Her longer ambition is generational and slightly inconvenient for anyone hoping for a quick brand story: she wants the business to grow so that future generations still have the chance to use authentic Shea butter, and to make it. That is a fifty year plan being described by a woman I met through a Shea butter order.

Loretta, finding out early what the family trade is.

What she wanted me to tell you

"Every customer brings a smile to our faces and we wish you all the blessings in return."

I asked once whether she meant every customer, or customers in general. She meant every customer. The group knows when orders come in and what they mean for the next batch, and the cooperative's capacity currently runs ahead of our orders, so demand is the constraint rather than ability.

How all of this started, from my side, is in how FairTale GHANA really began. The rest of it happens daily on Instagram, usually with Suzy somewhere in the frame, telling someone something.

FAQ

Who runs the FairTale GHANA cooperative?

The women own and run it themselves. Susana Sampamdoug is the chairwoman, responsible for local operations and quality, and decisions are made by consensus across the whole group.

How is quality checked before Shea butter is shipped?

By the women who made it. Susana answers for every batch that leaves the village, the elders judge the craft, and every woman uses her own butter daily on her own skin and her children's, including through harmattan season when the dry desert wind chaps everything.

Does FairTale GHANA own the cooperative?

No. We are a customer. The women own the operation, set their own prices and decide who joins.