From Russia to Nigeria to Italy: on hair and citizenship

Alice Edun is the CEO of AfroRicci, an e-commerce platform that since 2011 has specialised in offering and producing afro hair care products. The company became profitable about a year ago when it launched a line of natural cosmetics entirely made in Italy. Alice explains that AfroRicci is the first e-commerce platform of its kind in the country and this, she says, “is history”. She adds that her business model was innovative not much for the products it introduced, but for the new type of entrepreneur it disclosed. “It shows that I too contribute to the social, economic, and cultural growth of this country, which I love and I chose over others.” Alice decided to talk with MEE because, “it is important that Italy acknowledges the multi-ethnic woman.”

Alice is quick to refuse any form of self-pity, “I’d rather focus on facts than complain that Italy is a racist country — and, to be honest, only a very small percentage is so. I don’t care, let’s move on.” Yet something, maybe subtle prejudices and clichés, prompts her to underline that she has not ‘invaded’ this country (to use the most ignorant of the terms diffused in Italy).

Recently, a woman Alice has had a discussion with over a car park, stated that Alice, “does not seem Italian considering her attitude.” The most evident implication of such sentence is that only Italians can behave. Here citizenship does not only refer to a legal status but more broadly to a title able to make someone ‘better’, which is an irrational as much as widespread opinion in many countries.

To be clear, Alice has lived in Italy for over 20 years, holds an Italian citizenship, is married to an Italian man, and has two children of four and two born and raised in Milan. Since 2011, she has been a successful entrepreneur. She started up AfroRicci with her savings and with her husband’s support, gathering a community in Italy around the topic of afro hair. Initially she just imported products from abroad and later she launched her own line of cosmetics for curly and afro hair.

With an average of 250 orders per month — equivalent to 1500 products — more than 11 000 followers on Facebook, and numerous workshop around Italy, AfroRicci has grown four times since its inception and is ready to double the production in the next three months.

So, Alice has been a good entrepreneur. Was it because her Italian citizenship made her so or, rather, because of her story? She states that, “I would have done the same thing with or without being Italian.”

Alice was born in Russia in the 1970s. Her parents met in St Petersburg where they were both students. In those years, the Soviet Union was granting scholarships to citizens of developing countries aiming to promote their political ideology. Her father had gone to Russia from Nigeria benefitting from this program to study medicine, while her mother was graduating in engineering.

Short after her sister’s birth, Alice moved to Nigeria with her family when she was still a child. After a few years her parents divorced, and the two sisters started a long series of cultural and geographical peregrinations which led them to Italian and English schools in Lagos; to learn English, Yoruba, and Italian besides the Russian mother tongue; and to travel frequently.

They were introduced to the Italian education and country because their mother remarried to an Italian man who worked in Lagos. After her second divorce, their mother decided to leave Nigeria to Italy with her youngest child, while her two daughters remained in the former Nigerian capital with their father and his new wife.

Once completed their secondary studies, Alice reached her mother in the north Italian town of Vercelli; while her sister chose to move to the UK. It was the 1990s and Alice was studying and working at the same time, but she could not pursue a proper degree, “At that time Italy was not yet ready to offer foreigners the possibility to access a full degree program. It was still very close, the only way to do it was through an Erasmus program.”

Meanwhile Alice was singing. “I’ve always had this passion and after a while I jumped into the music world. I had a boyfriend at the time who was a piano player and he discovered my talent, so we started singing at restaurants and pubs just for fun.” Soon, though, it became a proper profession. They started being called by cruise companies, five-star hotels from Maldives to Dubai and Alice even reached the US dance music charts.

During her career as a singer Alice met Paolo, her future husband, and in 2013 she gave birth to their first child. “When I was pregnant, I had to decide whether to keep being a full-time musician — which implied staying out late at night and travelling often — or stop. I opted for keep singing but traveling only to nearby places so that my kid and my husband could come with me” says Alice.

These glimpses of Alice’s past show delicate and complex challenges. Moving frequently to different countries, or even within the same city, faded the idea of ‘home’ as a place of stability into a, “who knows how long we’ll be here for” Alice explains. Leaving and meeting beloved ones has been an intimate sufferance. The feeling of not having roots was reflected, for example, in the ambiguity of being called ‘white’ in Nigeria and ‘black’ in Italy. In Vercelli, some municipal employees used to spell words aloud thinking that Alice could not understand. Still now, there are people who consider her a foreigner although she has been living in Italy for over 20 years.

There is trace of Alice’s past in the energy and resilience that she used to become an entrepreneur. Her reactions to struggles channelled into a life attitude that she describes as, “Strength and courage. Period. I do not stop mourning what is not going well because nothing can stop my life path and obstruct what I want to achieve. I’ve never felt a victim.”

When Alice organised the first event that would later lead to AfroRicci she had very little support. She had called a specialist in afro hair care from the UK, had paid for the venue herself and yet, she says, “Most of the people there enjoyed the gathering but thought I could not make it.”

Yet, she had a lot of trust in her project because there was no platform in Italy which offered afro hair cosmetics, but there was definitely demand for it. Besides her friends, several Facebook groups were emerging around the topic. Moreover, she knew the problem well because since she had decided to grow her hair naturally, she had experienced both the difficulties in taking care of it and the hassle of buying products from abroad. She says that “Counting the overall cost of what I purchased from the US and the UK, I almost paid more in custom taxes than the products themselves!”

At the event, Alice met Reina, “the only truly enthusiastic one among the participants” as she describes her. Some months later, they embarked together into a hair-care tour around Italy to learn about the afro-haired population of the country and to give them advice on how to take care of their curls. It was a great success both in terms of knowledge acquired and partnership. “Reina is 20 year younger than me and she is studying to become a professional hair stylist. She taught me a great lot of things…besides taking selfies” explains Alice.

Throughout their journey, the duo realised the widespread lack of information about afro hair care was an opportunity. Alice decided to start an e-commerce platform to sell cosmetics, cutting the costs of importation for the Italian customers. “When I launched the platform, I did everything myself. Back then there were very few portals which offered ready-made websites, and the available ones were very expensive. Luckily, I had studied a bit of web design some years before when I was studying for a diploma in Italy.”

Short after, however, the success in sales persuaded Alice that there was demand enough to launch an AfroRicci line of cosmetics made in Italy for curly and afro hair. “Creating our own line, we understood the risk that it implied because we had to match the quality of the imported products which we had been selling, like Sea Moisture, which tops the quality rank in the US.”

They started with a cream and a spray, struggling to persuade the manufacturer company that the recipes they needed had to be very different from what they were used to make. But it has been a success: they have increased the range of cosmetics they produce, expanded the customer base, and are ready to keep growing.

Now, back to our question: is it citizenship (whatever the meaning attached to it) or personal stories which equip individuals with their skills and abilities?