How a 6th-Grade Dropout From Togo Built a $100M Fair Trade Brand With No VC

**Olowo-n'djo Tchala** grew up sharing an 8x10 room with his mother and seven siblings in Togo (a family of 41 brothers and sisters, one of the world's poorest countries) and left school after the sixth grade. In 1996, a Peace Corps volunteer named Prairie Rose came to his village. They fell in love and moved to California. Later on with 17 women in West Africa, a shea nut tree, and student loans, he built Alaffia: a fair-trade beauty company that would reach $100M in sales, 250,000 lives touched in West Africa, and shelf space in Whole Foods nationwide. No outside investors. For twenty years. Then the investors arrived. Four months later, Olo resigned. He couldn't look the West African women in the eyes and tell them their wages were being cut. He watched Alaffia deteriorate from the outside. He built Ayeya from scratch… no capital, a changed market, everything to prove again. Then, in late 2025, he bought Alaffia back. What Brennan and Olo get into in this episode goes beyond any founder story NAP has told: - Why Olo went 20 years without outside investors and what happened within 4 months of taking the money <!--THE END--> - The specific moment "optimization" crossed from business decision to personal betrayal <!--THE END--> - "I see all these women as my mother" and why that made the investor conversation impossible <!--THE END--> - The community programs that can't be measured in EBITDA, including a woman who named her baby after the brand because it saved her life <!--THE END--> - What two years of depression looked like after leaving a company woven into every wall of his home <!--THE END--> - How he launched Ayeya with no capital, in a market that had changed, and decided to go all out because he had nothing left to lose <!--THE END--> - Why buying Alaffia back felt like life and death, not a transaction <!--THE END--> - His vision: West Africa needs to stop being a raw material producer <!--THE END--> - His answer to the question he's always wanted to be asked: "What does healing look like in business?" <!--THE END--> - His billboard: "Don't compromise the fire that you have in you." <!--THE END--> Subscribe to Not Another Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Follow Infinity @infinityvc. Find Alaffia at alaffia.com, available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.