Eleve Essentials began with a simple, urgent question:

How do I care better for the people I love?

It started in a Lagos kitchen

In 2015, our home in Lagos, Nigeria, sat close to the beach. My husband had struggled for years with very sensitive skin and reacted to most store-bought soaps. My young daughter carried small scars on her legs from sand flies near our home.

At the same time, I was becoming more mindful of what came into our house — the food on our plates, the products on our shelves, the labels I could barely pronounce.

One day, I decided to try something different.

I made our first small batch of soap at the kitchen counter, using simple, familiar ingredients. When that first coconut milk bar finally brought my husband relief, it didn’t feel like a cute DIY project.

It felt like an answer.

From curiosity to craft

That moment sent me deeper.

I travelled to England to study the craft of soap and cream making, learning how to build formulas that are safe, effective and kind to the environment. I wanted to understand not just what to put into a bar, but why each ingredient was there and what it would feel like on real, tired skin.

But Eleve’s roots reach back even further than that trip.

I grew up watching my grandmother keep her skin soft with nothing more than coconut oil and shea butter, her quiet glow proved that simple, consistent rituals can be powerful. I also spent my childhood around my father’s manufacturing businesses in Nigeria, where I learned the dignity of making something with your hands and doing it well.

Those early influences — coconut oil, shea butter, factory floors, careful hands — are woven into everything we create today.

Care beyond the bathroom

For years, I shared my handmade soaps and creams locally in Nigeria under a small name.

During that time, something else grew alongside the products:

• Pad a Girl – a campaign that provided schoolgirls with sanitary supplies, helping them stay in school with dignity.
• A Bar for A Bar – an initiative that donated soap to rural communities and families displaced by flooding in Northern Nigeria.

These projects were simple, imperfect and deeply human. They shaped the heart of our work: care should move beyond the bathroom, into classrooms, communities and everyday life.

Care was never a slogan.
It was something we practised.

From Lagos to Calgary

When our family later moved to Canada, that same spirit came with us.

What began in a Lagos kitchen has evolved, quite naturally, into Eleve Essentials in Calgary — a home for coconut milk soaps, botanical body oils, whipped body soufflés and thoughtful gifts created for women who do the most.

Today:

• Every product is handcrafted in small batches
• Coconut milk sits at the centre of our formulas, a quiet nod to the ingredients my grandmother trusted
• Our botanical body oils are slow-infused with gentle botanicals like rose petals and lavender stems, so they leave skin comfortably moisturised, softly scented and quietly glowing
• Scents are built with essential oils, colours with clays and botanicals, always with purpose, never for show

From quick showers to late-night wind-downs after the kids are asleep, Eleve is designed to slip into real life, especially in cold, dry winters where skin often feels tight, dull and tired.

Legacy, family and quiet comfort

Eleve Essentials is my way of bringing many threads together:

• My grandmother’s simple rituals
• My father’s love of making
• My Nigerian roots and Canadian seasons
• The girls we met through Pad a Girl
• The families we reached through A Bar for A Bar
• And the women, like you, who carry a lot and still deserve softness

Every bar, bottle, jar and gift set is a small, daily reminder:

You may be tired.
You may be stretched.

But you still deserve quiet comfort — a gift of pure essence, right where you are.