For the Canada Water development to work for everyone, it needs to be a place where individuals and local businesses can flourish. Charity Tree Shepherd are on a mission to help entrepreneurs make this happen by establishing enterprises that serve the community.

Thrive is an affordable workspace run by Tree Shepherd next to Tesco in Surrey Quays Shopping Centre. British Land provide the unit for free, as well as contributing funding for the charity, meaning business owners need only to pay for utilities and other running costs. As well as offering local entrepreneurs a base, Tree Shepherd run workshops to help them grow their operations. British Land supports many of these workshops, either by presenting and sharing knowhow, or through making the Dock Office space available for groups to use.

Maame Opoku, Founder and Chief Executive of skincare brand MamaSia, lives in Bermondsey, “a stone’s throw from Canada Water and Surrey Quays”. She’s found Thrive to be a huge support in growing her business – not only through providing a place in which to make her products, but also by helping her find the confidence to overcome challenges and develop a new strand to the operation.

Maame founded MamaSia in 2012 as a natural skincare and wellness brand. “We’re based in the UK but what makes us different is we source a lot of our core ingredients from my ancestral family lands in Ghana,” she says.

“Our products predominantly use shea butter. It’s made from a fruit, which grows wild, we don’t plant it. Traditionally we use it to cook with, but it’s great for the skin and the hair because it’s got all these minerals and antioxidants. We eat the fruit and keep the seed. We sun-dry it, crush it, boil the crushed nuts and it turns into a fat. And that fat becomes shea butter. It’s a prized possession amongst African women.”

After researching her ancestry and tracing her roots back to northern Ghana, Maame had the idea to create a business that could help the community there. “My aunties, they’re the ones who are in the forest foraging the raw materials and shipping it over to us,” she says. “That’s the ecosystem of our brand.”

At the end of each year, the company give five per cent of their dividends back to the community in Ghana to help them be more sustainable.

International but local

MamaSia sell their products through their online shop, as well as in physical shops ranging from John Lewis to Somerset House. MamaSia also has a stall at Thrive’s monthly market in Surrey Quays Shopping Centre.

“I love it,” she says. “Thrive said ‘try the market’, and I thought ‘why would I try my local shopping centre? It doesn’t make sense’. You know what, I had to eat humble pie, because it does fantastically well. We have gained a local following, where people actually come looking for us every month to buy their favourite products. It’s a great place to meet my neighbours. It’s a community business, it really is.”

The support to carry on

If it hadn’t been for Thrive, MamaSia might well have gone out of business a few years ago. Maame originally ran the business with a partner, who decided to move on to other things following the Covid lockdown. So it’s now just her and her other, new business partner running MamaSia.

“I was contemplating shutting the business down because I thought how am I going to be able to run this by myself,” explains Maame. “I started speaking to Sandra and Magdalen at Thrive. They said no, you can’t stop, you need to come in and use our space.”

“They helped us reignite the business, because we almost gave up. I lost motivation, my self-esteem went. So not only did they help provide a structure, and a base to make the product, they helped me psychologically as well to believe in what I had started. I will forever be grateful to them for that.”

Time to breathe

Thrive also helped Maame nurture her other skillset. She’s a qualified breath coach, and alongside the skincare business, she runs wellness workshops. Through these, she’s able to help other business owners in the Thrive workspace. “I’d experienced what some of them can go through – doubt, uncertainty loss of motivation,” she says. “Starting a business is putting your whole essence into something. It could work but it might not work, and so there’s often a sense of anxiety. I’m able to go in and help them rejig their mindset. Thrive helped me when I sent through the same thing: now I’m able to pay it forward and give back to my community.

“Thrive understood that the two businesses could complement each other, they totally got what we were doing.”

Looking ahead, Maame and her business partner hope to set up the skincare business in more outlets and expand into other parts of the country. They also run workshops for students interested in getting into the beauty sector, to give them a feel for what it’s like to set up a business.

“There has to be some kind of social impact from what we do,” she says. “As we’re growing and the business is growing, I see there’s a need for helping others. So I’m now embarking on setting up a Community Interest Company to help others within the community. It will be business mentoring, breath workshops and helping the next generation of entrepreneurs who are feeling overwhelmed or anxious about their idea, saying we’ve done it, and this is how you can do it.”

Wherever MamaSia’s business journey takes them next, they’re sure Thrive will continue to be a part of it somehow. We’ll always be engaged with Thrive I think,” she says. “We’re two peas in a pod now.”

Check out MamaSia’s online shop at mama-sia.com