My daughter inspired me to launch a baby skincare brand

Times

2 days ago

Casyo Johnson remembers his first lesson in business, aged 13, at his school in south London. Stanley Technical High School, as it was known then, didn't have an activities room to occupy the pupils during breaks. It also didn't have any money. So Johnson, now better known as Krept from the rap duo Krept and Konan, offered to raise the cash himself.
He signed up his fellow pupils to give him 20p a day. 'I had a table with names, payment dates,' he recalls of the tight operation. After three weeks he handed over enough cash to pay for the facility. 'They took the money and didn't do anything,' he says.
It was a tough lesson for a 13-year-old and it understandably still rankles. Instead of ping-pong, Johnson focused on surviving the gang violence around him and on his music, teaming up with his school friend Karl Wilson, alias Konan, in 2008. Their breakthrough came in 2013 when their independently produced album Young Kingz took off. It holds a Guinness record as the highest-charting UK album by an unsigned act.
Johnson, now 35 and a father of one, still performs regularly. Krept and Konan launched a new album, Young Kingz II, in February this year and the pair are playing at summer festivals across Europe. He has also been able to put the business lessons from that early experience in school to good use.
In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, Johnson and his partner at the time, Sasha Ellese Gilbert, developed a natural skincare product for their baby daughter Nala. Gilbert, in particular, bridled at the toxicity of some of the common ingredients in mainstream toiletries. She used ingredient rating apps such as Think Dirty and Yuka and did not like what she found.
'When you scan these products you see how clean they are,' Johnson says. They couldn't find any brand with a full range of excellent ratings. 'It was a lightbulb moment. We thought, 'Why don't we do it?''
Johnson discovered a world of natural alternatives and the pair created recipes that they took to a manufacturer with a lab where they could be developed and tested properly.
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The next step was to decide on pricing. Johnson wanted to position the range at the affordable end of the market so he sought out retailers to be a launch partner, starting with Boots. Such a big brand would also help reassure customers, typically young mothers. After all, what does a musician from south London know about producing safe toiletries for babies?
Helped by his high profile, as well as his commitment to the project, a deal was struck and the brand, Nala's Baby, was launched in June 2022. Roll forward three years and Nala's Baby is a profitable £5.5 million turnover business, stocked in supermarkets like Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury's, as well as over 1,000 Boots stores. It is also sold on Amazon and through its own website.
As Krept, Johnson has just returned from playing at the Wireless festival and is off to another in Paris after we talk. In Nala's Baby, he sees a venture that can provide a legacy for his daughter in the way that music cannot. 'In music, I know that I have to be the one writing music, going on tour. But what would I be able to pass down to my daughter? In music, you have to be the entertainer at all times. It is not something you can let stand on its own two feet without you being there. So long term, I always knew I wanted to get into business.'
Johnson and Wilson had tried opening a bar and restaurant in Croydon first, called Crepes & Cones, but it closed as the first Covid lockdown hit. While eating out can be taken away, people will always have babies and babies will need cleaning, he reasoned. 'You always need to wash, regardless of what happens.'
Getting Nala's Baby off the ground was not easy and Johnson credits the consultant Shaz Saleem for supporting the initial phase. 'We were winging it,' he admits. Johnson has a degree in accounting and finance so could cope with the numbers, but those numbers got quite big, quite quickly.
It took 18 months to develop the first eight products and the co-founders wanted to launch with an eye-catching roster of 'approved by' credentials, ranging from its efficacy on the skin to being safe for babies and suitable for vegans. The tests themselves were eye-wateringly expensive. 'I wanted to tick every single box,' Johnson says. Before long they had invested £250,000.
This was enough to give them their break with Boots, but now Johnson needed more cash to begin production. The cost of the indicative orders from Boots and minimum production levels required from the manufacturer were sobering.
So Johnson pitched to friends and family, including Konan and the likes of Anthony Joshua, the former heavyweight world champion. They backed him and he sold a stake, raising £1.5 million. 'There is a lot of pressure because you are taking money from people you know to invest in your dream,' he says. 'But I genuinely thought it was going to work.'
Some friends were not 100 per cent convinced, though. 'Some did say this is a bit risky, man. You are going into baby skincare. This is crazy.'
He admits he didn't see the baby skincare entrepreneur in him before it happened. 'I never, never saw it coming, for me to be doing this. But my life went down that road when I had a daughter. It was never planned but it felt right at the time. I became a father and so I understood the need for [Nala's Baby] even more, just being a dad, saying 'I would want this for my daughter'.'
Knowing he had six months before the launch in Boots, Johnson plotted out what he would do each day to build awareness on his social media: he has more than 690,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. The effort worked.
'I wanted it to be a frenzy and that is literally what happened,' he recalls. Nala's Baby sold out online within ten minutes and many of the 400 Boots stores saw their shelves cleared. Some products started popping up on eBay, being offered at well above the retail price.
Feedback from customers with skin issues was positive and by 2023 it won the Mother & Baby best baby skincare range award, as voted for by parents, beating the previous winner and market leader Childs Farm. 'It was a key moment for us,' Johnson recalls, as there were supermarket buyers in the room.
Boots took its new range, called Vanilla Cloud, to more than 1,000 stores and the supermarkets followed. Nala's Baby now claims to have an 8 per cent share of the market.
As the business became a more serious business venture, Johnson also used his contacts for advice, including his friend Franklin Asante, who is head of entrepreneurs at the private bank Coutts.
Asante sat Johnson next to Saeb Eigner, former chairman of the Dubai Financial Services Authority, at a dinner. The two chatted and after Johnson had completed some homework to prove he was serious, Eigner introduced him to Gordon McCallum, the former chief executive of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group. He in turn introduced Johnson to Anna James, a former marketing director at Mothercare and Carphone Warehouse, who became Nala's chief operating officer.
James recommended someone she had worked with, Ben Newnum, who joined as Nala's managing director in July 2023. 'He lives, eats and breathes Nala's Baby,' says Johnson, full of admiration for Newnum's attitude and work ethic. The 'introducers' have all invested in Nala's Baby, sensing a good thing.
The business is now a team of eight, soon to be ten, all working out of a small office on the fourth floor of a building next to Paddington station in London. The location suits the team more than Johnson, who lives in Essex and has a 90-minute commute.
Next up is the launch of a natural multi-purpose sanitiser 'that is effective as bleach but is not harmful'. Then next year is international expansion, either in Europe or the US. 'I do want it to be a global brand,' Johnson says. 'We are gearing up for 2026 to go international.'