Rooted in Heritage. Built Through Experience. Ready to Scale.

I am a Jamaican Maroon from St. Thomas. The Maroons are descendants of Africans who resisted enslavement, established independent communities and preserved important elements of African culture, identity and knowledge across generations.

Growing up in rural Jamaica, herbs, roots, leaves, barks and traditional preparations were not something I discovered later through wellness culture. They were part of everyday life. My grandmother had a particularly strong influence on the way I looked at plants and traditional remedies — knowledge passed through observation, conversation and experience. Plants were simply something people understood.

As an adult, that early foundation was eventually joined by research and studies in Medical Herbalism. But the motivation to study health more deeply came from something much more personal.

Archive

My hormonal health journey began unusually early. I was diagnosed with menopause in my early twenties, and later navigated PCOS, fertility difficulties, significant weight problems, pituitary tumours, alopecia and Type 2 diabetes — which I subsequently brought into remission. All of this began before there was a Zyzven Naturals shop.

I was trying to understand why my body was behaving the way it was. That meant reading, researching, questioning, making lifestyle changes, and repeatedly returning to the plants and traditional knowledge I had grown up around.

Even today, when customers repeatedly bring a particular wellness concern to us, my instinct is to study it. I hold no formal qualification in food chemistry, and I think transparency about that matters. I develop the original formulation concepts and ingredient combinations using my research, Medical Herbalism knowledge, traditional botanical understanding, lived experience and the needs repeatedly identified within our community. The formulations are then refined with our technical and manufacturing partners before commercial production.

Archive · 2016

Any photographs from the original ethnic shop in Sweden.

Sweden, 2016.

Lawrence and I opened an ethnic retail shop in Sweden. At first, skincare and haircare became our focus. We were looking closely at some of the products traditionally marketed towards Black and brown consumers, and became uncomfortable with some of the ingredient profiles we were seeing. We wanted products we felt comfortable using within our own family and recommending to customers.

At the same time, an unexpected group of customers began approaching us. Swedish parents raising adopted and foster children with different skin and hair needs would come into the shop looking for help finding appropriate products for their children. Those conversations made the gap increasingly obvious — people needed better options. And then something happened during a trip to Jamaica that gave us our first product.

Our then four-year-old child was badly affected by mosquito bites during a trip to Jamaica. I wanted a botanical alternative for him, so I began making one. The result was a mosquito-repellent soap. That became our first product.

There was no factory. No large formulation team. No sophisticated packaging operation. Lawrence and I made products ourselves, wrapped them and packed them by hand.

Before professional manufacturing and international warehouses, there were products made, wrapped and packed by our own hands.

Today those pictures make me smile, but I also treasure them because they represent where the company truly started. Then came the product that changed everything.

Jamaica, 2017–2018.

During an extended stay in Jamaica, I was experiencing alopecia. Once again, I started researching. In a small kitchen, I began producing an onion-based botanical oil as part of my own hair journey — and documenting that journey openly on Facebook. People could actually watch what was happening. They asked what I was using. They followed the progress. Then they started asking if they could buy it.

That formulation became Zyzven Naturals Onion Growth Oil — our breakthrough product. Customers began sharing their experiences and telling others about the oil, and over the years have told us about the many ways they incorporate it into their routines, across hair, scalp, skin and nail care.

Today, most of our products have transitioned into professional contract manufacturing. The Onion Growth Oil has not — we still make it ourselves. For me, it remains the product that connects the modern Zyzven Naturals to that small kitchen in Jamaica.

Archive

My own weight and metabolic journey eventually changed the company again. I had struggled for years with stubborn abdominal weight alongside my hormonal issues. I began researching botanicals for myself and eventually developed a loose-leaf formulation that became Alki Detox — another breakthrough, and one of our most successful products.

But the most important part was what customers started telling us. People would return and talk about their weight-management journeys, digestion and general wellbeing. Some told us about changes in blood pressure or blood sugar readings they were already monitoring. Over the years, some customers have told us they achieved Type 2 diabetes remission while incorporating our products into broader lifestyle and medically supervised changes.

Those are customer experiences, not promises that a supplement can treat or cure diabetes — but they became important because they encouraged much larger conversations around metabolic wellness. Soon people were asking us about blood sugar, hormones, PCOS, menopause, fertility, fibroids, weight management and men's health. And the company changed.

We did something else that became fundamental to Zyzven Naturals. We educated. I began hosting Facebook Lives around the subjects our customers were asking about — hormones, PCOS, menopause, fertility, weight, metabolic wellness, hair loss.

A woman would hear a conversation about hormonal symptoms and suddenly say, this sounds like me. Someone would share the Live with a sister, a friend, a partner or a parent. Our social media became much more than somewhere to advertise — it became a community classroom. Education created conversation. Conversation created trust. Trust created recommendations. And those recommendations built the brand.

Zyzven Naturals has never relied on paid advertising to build its customer base. Our customers became our strongest ambassadors.

Hormone health, the ‘baby factory’ & creating space for menopause. Then customers began returning with pregnancy announcements ‚Äî and eventually photographs of babies. It happened often enough that our community affectionately began calling Zyzven Naturals ‘the baby factory.’ We have never promised pregnancy. Fertility is complex, and our products are not fertility treatments. But hearing from so many women who chose our products as part of their wider hormonal and fertility journey became one of the most meaningful parts of building the brand.

Those conversations eventually contributed to my book, WombWise – Womb Wisdom & The Works, a culturally aware guide to menopause and women's wellness. We don't only want people to buy our products. We want people to better understand their bodies.

For years, medicinal loose-leaf teas were central to Zyzven Naturals. They were close to my Jamaican botanical roots and gave us the ability to create complex blends around specific wellness needs. But customers kept asking us for something else: convenience. They loved the teas, but people were working, travelling and raising families. Not everyone could brew medicinal tea every day.

That pushed us into advanced food supplements. But we did not want simply to grind raw herbs into powder, put them in capsules and call the job finished. Our objective became practitioner-strength formulations built around concentrated and standardised botanical extracts where appropriate — particularly where concentration and consistency in specified plant constituents matter.

Today, our strongest formulation areas include hormonal wellness, metabolic health, women's wellness, menopause, men's vitality, healthy weight management and everyday wellbeing.

There was a time when Lawrence and I physically made and packed the products ourselves. Growth meant that could not remain the model for everything. Today, most Zyzven Naturals products are professionally contract manufactured through carefully selected partners — giving us greater production capacity, consistency, documentation and quality control. Our Onion Growth Oil remains produced by us, carrying that direct connection to the handmade beginnings.

Our wider manufacturing and quality framework now includes, depending on the product and facility, standards and certifications such as GMP manufacturing, HACCP and BRCGS systems, third-party analytical testing, Vegan and Non-GMO specifications, and Halal and Kosher certification where applicable — with appropriately registered facilities for the markets being served. Not every certification applies to every product, and we believe it is important to be transparent about that distinction. Our products are also covered by product liability insurance across key markets.

I was not naturally a businessperson. I was a formulator with ideas, customers and a strong ability to connect with people. In the early years, Zyzven Naturals began gaining real momentum — including getting products onto retail shelves in Jamaica. Then life changed. Personal circumstances and moving countries meant much of what we had built could not simply continue in the same way.

Our family moved from Sweden to the United Kingdom, and in many respects Zyzven Naturals had to start again. We rebuilt the customer base. We learned new regulations and systems. We developed new manufacturing relationships. We strengthened the products. We built new fulfilment infrastructure. London became an important headquarters and international base.

Eventually, our family's journey brought us back to Sweden. This time, however, we were not returning with the same small company that had left — we returned with experience, international customers, stronger formulations, professional manufacturing relationships, better systems and a much clearer understanding of the company we wanted to build.

When COVID-19 disrupted jobs and livelihoods, I watched women around us lose income. Zyzven Naturals was still growing, but I wanted the company to become useful in another way. We began allowing women to access our products at low wholesale rates, sell them within their communities and keep the profit. That early model gave some women an opportunity during a difficult period — but it also taught us important business lessons. An informal model is difficult to sustain as a company grows.

We learned that successful long-term partnerships need clear pricing, professional agreements, structure, boundaries, territory considerations and reliable wholesale and distribution systems. So the model evolved. Today, we are deliberately expanding structured opportunities for retailers, resellers, wellness professionals and distributors to carry Zyzven Naturals.

Building a legacy beyond our own family. Our children have grown up alongside Zyzven Naturals, and we are building something they can eventually understand, participate in and potentially carry forward. But legacy cannot only mean our own children — a portion of Zyzven Naturals' profits supports girls' education in rural Gambia, where we are helping to fund the development of a school. Education can change what becomes possible for a girl. Entrepreneurship can change what becomes possible for a woman.