Kuumba Made began in a 36-foot outrigger canoe. Inside the boat: Denise Kuumba Piazza, age 19, a Bostonian. Hard on the heels of a New England winter she’d toughed out in a teepee, now set afloat in the tepid, turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
She learned how to make coconut oil.
“I fell in love with that process,” said Kuumba, founder and CEO of Kuumba Made, a botanicals and fragrances company that has called Tucson home for 45 years.
“I was so excited that I was able to do it step-by-step…. It’s a real tedious process, but I like to do things that get results eventually.”
Kuumba moved home to Boston, and then to Western Massachusetts, where mountains meet mill towns and the Connecticut River Valley makes everything green. Living by candlelight, she apprenticed with an herbalist and cultivated all her own materials.
“My life has been organic in the way of just doing what I love to do,” Kuumba said. “And I have an entrepreneurial spirit, or a creative spirit, and I was thinking about the fragrances and how I can expand more and sell at the local co-op.”
A spiritual name
When Kuumba figured it was good sense to put a label on her coconut oil jars, she came up with a fitting name: her own — a spiritual name, found during a conversation with a friend about African dance.
“We were in the car and I was talking about what it meant to me to dance to the drum, and I said it was like the drummer is telling a story, and the dancer gets to express her love for life,” Kuumba explained. “And then I said to my friend ‘I really wish I had a name to describe this feeling.’”
As the story goes, the entrepreneur and her friend said the word “Kuumba” at the same time.
“I would say it was a gift from spirit,” Kuumba said. “A gift from my angels, or God, or however you want to say it.”
A Senegalese Griot, a friend, blessed her with the name. Ma Kuumba, the “mother of all: the mother sheep that is going to feed the world, take care of people.”
“Kuumba” carries various meanings across languages. In Swahili, it means creativity, specifically, the creativity to make one’s community “more beautiful and beneficial than it was inherited,” according to the International African American Museum.
“I feel I’ve really lived my life that way,” Kuumba said. “I just love making things more beautiful, and I love making products that make people smell good, look good, and feel good.”
Outfitted with an apt business name, Kuumba travelled around the country, pitching her coconut oils to Whole Foods regional corporate offices.
“We are a national brand with Whole Foods,” Kuumba said. “We’ve been with Whole Foods for probably 38 years or so, almost since the beginning. We became national probably 20 years ago.”
A Tucson institution
In 1993, the company put down roots in Tucson.
Kuumba had taken several camping trips to Arizona and, eventually, like the Muir quote, the mountains called on her. The founder and her partner upended their lives to start again in the Sonoran desert, where she set up Kuumba Made out of a cramped apartment.
“Tucson is a wonderful place, it has so much art and culture and music and people doing wonderful things,” Kuumba said. “It’s a great place to be.”
“I had two desks in my living-kitchen room, so we basically lived within the business. And then in the other bedroom we did all the pouring of the oils and making things, then sending them out and shipping.”
After about eight years, Kuumba and her team upgraded to a 2,200 square foot house, and then later tripled its size with a “homey-looking” facility on Fort Lowell.
As Kuumba Made expanded, so did its roots in Southern Arizona. Apprenticing with renowned herbalist Michael Cottingham at Arizona’s Eden Hot Springs, Kuumba familiarized herself with the unique plantlife of the Southwest. When starting the Desert Offerings line, the company used materials harvested locally or grown on Kuumba’s own acre of land.
The business continued to flourish, as Kuumba Made branched out into facial skincare and CBD products. Tremendous growth led to the company moving into a 18,000 square foot space on Forbes and Broadway, where it is headquartered today.
“I didn’t have any investors, so it was like climbing a ladder. Each year we’d grow anywhere from 10% to 30 or 40%.”
Part of growing with a community is reinvesting into it, which Kuumba Made does through its support of Tucson Village Farm, which the owner serves on the board of, Mission Gardens, and Iskashitaa Harvesting Network, an organization that involves U.N. refugees in local food-waste reduction projects.
“As far as other philanthropy, we pay a lot of attention to the food bank and a lot of places that feed and shelter the homeless. Places where we know the money’s going directly to support and help people live a better life.”
“I think that’s kind of the fun about having a business. You can give back.”
New Beginnings
Kuumba Made is in the process of realizing two next steps. First, the company is looking into acquiring a copper distiller to distill some of the local southwestern plants that the company grows and harvests.
“I think that’s just a really exciting thing to do and then we can sell them locally,” Kuumba said, introducing a second development for the business, the opening of a brick-and-mortar retail store in Tucson.
The store will be located in the Sam Hughes neighborhood, just a few doors down from Tumerico, Kuumba explained.
“We’ll be able to sell products locally that we wouldn’t necessarily be wholesaling,” Kuumba said. “For instance, when we get a distiller, we’ll have a batch that will be just that batch, you know?”
“It will be exclusive to the retail shop,” added Xavier Chapa, Kuumba Made marketing manager.
“We are starting in Tucson first because we are headquartered here, but mostly because it is our focus market,” Chapa said. “We really appreciate the Tucson community, and it’s our way of also just putting Tucson more on the map.”
