Six years ago, Omez Beauty Products started in a single room, with a single conviction: that the natural hair community deserved authentic chebe, real, traceable, sourced from Chad, instead of the diluted imitations flooding the market.
On March 18, we mark six years of that work. This is the story of how we got here, what we learned along the way, honestly including the hard parts, and where the brand goes next.
If you found this page because you are researching whether Omez is a brand you can trust before ordering, welcome! This page was written for you as much as for our longtime community. We would rather you know exactly who we are before you spend a dollar with us.
Where it started
Omez Beauty was founded by Victoria Ometere Abraham around a single ingredient: chebe, the traditional Chadian preparation the Basara Arab women have used for generations to grow waist-length natural hair in one of the harshest climates on Earth. Victoria tells that story in her own words in her honest answer to whether chebe really grows hair, including why she built the brand, what she learned from the Basara women, and what she refuses to promise.
The founding problem was simple to name and hard to solve. As chebe went viral across North America, the market flooded with products that used the word "chebe" on the label and contained trace amounts of the ingredient, or none at all. Women tried these products, saw nothing, and concluded chebe was hype. The tradition was taking the blame for the counterfeits.
Omez was built to be the honest alternative: chebe sourced directly from Chad, prepared in keeping with the tradition, in formulations calibrated for 4C and coily hair. That founding promise has not changed in six years. The authentic chebe guide explains what separates real chebe from the imitation market, and it is the standard we hold our own products to.
Six years, honestly told
Small business anniversaries usually get told as victory laps. Ours had real victories, but like most handmade beauty brands, the journey included stretches that tested whether we would still be here to write this.
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Year one: a single room, small batches, and a customer base built one order at a time through word of mouth in the natural hair community.
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Years two and three: growth, and the operational growing pains that come with it. Sourcing authentic chebe at increasing volume without compromising the supply chain was, and remains, the hardest part of this business.
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Years four and five: the brand reached customers across the United States, Canada, and Nigeria, and our products entered multiple retail locations. We also learned hard lessons about which products earned their place in the line and which stretched us too thin.
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Year six: consolidation and expansion at the same time, focusing the core haircare line on the products our community actually reorders, while expanding into the styling categories our customers kept asking for.
Every challenge shaped the brand. And every year, the thing that kept us here was the same: customers who reordered, reviewed, messaged, and told their sisters and daughters and friends. This business exists because of that community. That is not a marketing line. It is the literal mechanism by which a single-room operation survives six years in a market dominated by companies a thousand times our size.
From haircare to a full hair experience
For most of our six years, Omez focused exclusively on haircare, products designed to nourish, strengthen, and protect natural hair. That focus remains the core of the brand. But over the years, one customer request kept recurring: styling options that work with a healthy hair routine, not against it.
So the store has grown. Alongside our haircare line, Omez now offers hair extensions, braiding hair, crochet hair, and wigs, chosen with the same standard we apply to everything else: quality that supports a healthy hair journey rather than undermining it.
The connection between protective styling and healthy hair is not incidental to us, it is the heart of the chebe tradition itself. The Basara women coat their hair and braid it; the braid is what gives chebe its extended contact time. Modern protective styles work the same way. Applying the Omez Chebe Hair Butter to your natural hair before installing braids, crochet, or a wig keeps your strands moisturised and protected for the entire life of the style. The step-by-step chebe guide covers the pre-install application in detail.
That is why this expansion makes sense for a haircare brand: the styles and the care were never separate categories in the tradition we come from. Now they are not separate in our store either.
Making Omez more accessible worldwide
One consistent piece of feedback from customers outside North America has been shipping cost. We hear it, and we are actively working on it, including a logistics partnership designed to bring international shipping costs down. Accessibility is part of the founding mission: the tradition came from Africa, our founder came from Africa, and the products should be realistically available to customers there and everywhere else.
Watch our website and newsletter for current shipping offers, we run promotions regularly as we work toward permanently lower international rates.
What will never change
Expansion invites a fair question: is the brand still the same brand? Here is what is fixed, regardless of how the product line evolves.
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Authentic Chadian chebe, traceably sourced. The ingredient that founded the brand remains the centre of it.
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Honesty over hype. We will keep telling you what our products cannot do, no product grows hair faster, and we will never claim otherwise.
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Formulated for textured hair. 4C, coily, and tightly textured hair is who we build for, first and always.
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Clean formulation. No parabens, sulfates, silicones, or synthetic fragrance in our haircare line.
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Small-brand accountability. When you message us, a person answers. That does not scale gracefully, and we protect it anyway.
Thank you — and what comes next
Every order, every review, every message, every photo of a length check that made us grin at our phones, that is what six years is made of. Thank you for being part of it.
If you are new here and want to understand what we are about, start with the story of chebe itself, the tradition this whole brand exists to honour. If you want the practical side, the complete 4C hair care routine shows how our approach works day to day. And the About page has the rest of the brand story.
Six years in, one promise unchanged. The Omez Chebe Hair Butter, authentic Chadian chebe, raw shea butter, and traditional oils, is the product this brand was built around, and the one we would still recommend you start with. Here is to the next six years.