An Entrepreneur With a Purpose

Okorie's instinct to push the boundaries of what's possible stretches back to her own time at Brooks. She journeyed to North Andover for school from her childhood in Lagos, following her sister, Hauwa Okorie '06, to Brooks. "When I was applying, of course, Brooks was one of the schools on my list, and I visited and obviously fell in love with it," Okorie says."I felt that Brooks was a small, close community. Of course, it's far up in the Northeast, a freezing place!" she laughs. "But I didn't mind. I loved that there were a lot of activities that we weren't forced to try, but encouraged to try."

At Brooks, Okorie tried activities ranging from soccer to basketball to the school musical, and she appreciates the opportunity to have spread her wings. "I definitely tried different things before I found out exactly what I wanted to pursue in college," she says. "I think that's why I loved Brooks. It was a very wholesome community that pushed me to try many different things."

She matriculated at The George Washington University, where she put the ideal of trying different paths into practice. She began in the school of arts and sciences, and then transferred to the business school, where she learned the basics of business, accounting and finance. She then focused on hospitality, and held positions with several prominent hotel chains after graduating college. "I liked hospitality because I was doing work that helped the community and helped customers," Okorie says. "I love building brands, and hospitality also exposed me to accounting, to finance, to sales. I found my interest in marketing and learned about the digital marketing landscape, which is a big portion of how I push my brand today."

When Okorie moved back to Lagos in 2017, she saw a booming Nigerian tourism industry with only a few swimwear brands to meet demand for Nigeria's warm, tropical tourist destinations. "You could probably count the number of brands that made up the swimwear industry in Nigeria on one hand," she recalls. "This was a market that I knew I could fill." Okorie saw her chance and began her market research and design process, focusing on creating an affordable, locally inspired brand with "pieces that actually fit people."

Salt and Sunscreen's first capsule has three collections; each collection calls to Okorie's identity and family history. "I picked solid colors first, before working my way to prints," she says. "It's bold and fierce depending on how you style it." She uses a lot of yellows that, she says, evoke the warm weather and the sun in Lagos. The green in her pieces calls back to the nature and natural beauty of her home. The deep red that's prevalent in Salt and Sunscreen pieces evokes images of Okorie's father's village in the eastern part of Nigeria. "It's almost like the color of the sand, the deep red," she says. "So there are little things that tie back to who I am as a person." Okorie is also introducing new colors and a set of prints, she says: stripes that flatter different body types and abstract designs that call to flowers that are native to Nigeria.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged Okorie's efforts toward Salt and Sunscreen in many ways; still, she pushes on. She's taken steps to expand her customer base outside Nigeria and into the rest of Africa and the world: She's ordered fabric and arranged for local tailors to sew her pieces; she's expanded into beachwear to accompany her swimwear; and she's continued to promote her brand on social media. "I want to pave my own path to what I want to do," she says. "I hope to create a brand in the future that is not only for people in Nigeria, but for people across Africa. I want people to be able to buy an African brand, and not have to buy from outside the continent."