The brand Lolita built to save her own hair | Umthi

Lolita Sanders (Boyd Visuals)

Four of my favourite haircare products sit almost empty on my bathroom counter – a restorative botanical hair oil, a nourishing shampoo and conditioner and a leave-in cream that smell how you would want your hair to smell – warm, herbal and green, not artificially sweet and perfumed. They’re almost empty now those containers – and there’s no way I can replace them because they’re not available to buy in South Africa. The brand is Umthi (meaning tree in isiZulu) and they’re made by my friend Lolita Sanders – a proud South African who’s been living in the UK since we all graduated from university.

Lots didn’t set out to build a haircare brand. She set out to figure out why her hair was falling out in heaps, and the brand was what was left over once she’d worked it out. She’d been using a natural haircare line and was convinced it was doing wonders. She remembers thinking about how good it was until she noticed her hair thinning at the back and said so out loud. ‘You don’t have any hair at the back, dude,’ her husband confirmed.

Some time back, when Lots and I were talking about the brand she has built and plotting how we could bring it here, I was listening to her the way an inspired friend does and as someone who has spent a long time being sold haircare products that don’t do what they promise. And then there’s also that special brand of disappointment that’s specific to this industry that caters to our hair – the independent formula you love gets bought out by a bigger distributor and a few beats later the ingredients list has quietly changed, all the care and consideration and community out the window to produce something cheaper to produce at scale. 

So how did she get it right with Umthi?

Her hair falling out turned out to have nothing to do with the products she was using at the time and everything to do with side effects from medication she was taking: extreme fatigue, lack of appetite, weight loss. The hair loss was the last straw and forced her to connect the dots. She wouldn’t be able to change or stop taking the medication so she went looking for a hair fix she could control. 

She remembered what had worked when she’d first gone natural more than a decade earlier – when she was pregnant with her eldest son. She stopped relaxing her hair because she didn't want to pass the toxins onto him, instead reaching for avocado, rice water, onion rinses, all the home remedies people swear by for regrowth and the same her parents and grandparents used – and ran straight into their biggest challenge. ‘I smelled like vinegar for days!’ she says. While it was effective, it was far from sexy and not something you can keep in a fridge indefinitely without worrying it’s gone off.

That’s the gap Umthi was built to close: the good stuff without the smell or the spoilage. 

She’d spend her Saturdays at Neal’s Yard, absorbing whatever she could about formulation, and in December 2019, just before lockdown, she enrolled in a cosmetic-making course. It gave her something more useful than technique. It gave her the confidence to actually understand what she was doing. ‘I could read my labels,’ she says, ‘I could read the breakdown of chemicals and know when something is ready to attach to something or detach. I’d enjoyed chemistry at school but I never thought the little knowledge I had would help me come through this.’

What emerged was a small and effective interlocking system informed by research, chemistry and three generations of plant knowledge : a shampoo that doubles as shower gel – now sold as the Botanical Brew Restorative Shampoo; a conditioner that works as a deep conditioning mask – the Botanical Brew Restorative Conditioner; a leave-in that detangles, activates curls and revives dry hair; and a hair-and-body oil – the Restorative Botanical Oil built from seven different oils.

The only product I have not had the pleasure of using is the Hair and Body Butter for edges, shine and sealing in a twist-out, that also doubles as a lip balm. And the newly launched face and body care range. All the products are designed to interchange and layer each other. 

The packaging follows the same logic. She chose aluminium over plastic or glass because of how it recycles – aluminium doesn’t degrade the way the plastic does after each cycle. Still, the product has a six-month usage window once opened due to oxidation and the cross-contamination that comes with hands going in and out of the container. 

Of course, none of this was cheap to prove. Sending two products – a shower gel and a body lotion she was happy with – off for full lab testing for preservative efficacy, stability and shelf life cost about £1,000 and took about three months. But before any of that, she would run her own freeze-and-thaw tests at home to find the formula’s weak points before paying the lab to confirm them. While cumbersome and time-absorbing, all the home-testing proved to be the best way to best understand her craft. She learnt she could produce 100 units a day, by herself, a number she tested properly at the Afro Hair & Beauty Show, and ultimately won Best New Brand at the show in 2022. In the same year, Umthi also won Best Conditioner for natural/textured hair awarded by Marie Claire and debuted at London Fashion Week. The now 12x–award-winning brand most recently won Sustainability Champion at the Best of Royal Greenwich Business Awards 2026.

Despite all the accolades, there’s still a goal she’s chasing: bringing Umthi to its roots. As a South African girl at heart, the aim is to open a small production hub here putting South African women, especially working mothers, on the other end of the process. Until then, I’ll keep rationing what’s left in those bottles.