Entrepreneur Says $70,000 Worth of Products Were Stolen From Her Shea Butter Business

Recovering from economic loss is hard for any small business. This week, a Black woman came to her store to find that all of her inventory had been stolen, equating to $70,000 in revenue loss, leaving her and her team in a perilous situation.

Ghanaian-born Charity Dinko is an entrepreneur living in Richmond, Virginia, who has run her successful shea butter business, Northsea, for four years as a way to help women in her home country liberated out of poverty.

“We produce incredible shea butter that we also use in making our body butter, and we sell wholesale and retail to other businesses that make soap as well,” Dinko told NBC12. “The people there are extremely hardworking, especially the women, and there is extreme poverty to the point where most of them don’t even have food to feed their kids daily.”

One day when she came back to check in on her inventory space, she discovered that all of her items had been stolen. “I came back in the evening around 5:45, open this space up, just to realize they were right. Everything was gone,” she explained. “Almost 70 thousand dollars worth of items and sweat and all the work we put in over the past couple of years was wiped away.”

An online fundraiser has been opened where people can donate to help Dinko keep her operations opens and keep her staff as the police can gather more details on the theft.

“To produce 2,000 pounds of shea butter took about 30 days for us… and to go back and tell them that all of their hard work is gone is completely unbelievable,” said Dinko. “They don’t even understand who did it and why.”