Heritage
A house, in its own words
Nyakio Grieco (pronounced Neh-Kay-Oh) launched her eponymous bath and body brand in the early 2000s, with sources citing either 2001 or 2002 as the founding year. The brand grew from a direct-to-consumer operation into broader retail, eventually becoming a presence at Target stores. Grieco has spoken openly about drawing on her Kenyan roots and the beauty rituals practiced by the women in her family, including her grandmother, who reportedly taught her about natural ingredients like coffee and shea butter for skin care. The brand's expansion into fragrance came with Safi, a scent that Grieco began expanding into wider distribution in the years following its 2008 launch. The name itself, Safi, means 'pure' in Swahili, reflecting the cultural connection at the heart of the brand. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Grieco co-founded Thirteen Lune, an e-commerce and later retail platform designed to spotlight brands founded by people of color. She also launched Relevant Skin, another beauty venture focused on multitasking formulations. Grieco's path through the beauty industry has not been without friction. In interviews she has discussed navigating racial bias as a Black beauty entrepreneur, particularly during the pandemic when her brand faced public scrutiny. The experience informed her subsequent advocacy for equitable representation in beauty retail, a theme central to Thirteen Lune's mission. Today, the Nyakio brand sits within a broader portfolio of ventures that Grieco leads as founder and CEO. For Grieco, fragrance is inseparable from identity, ancestry, and emotional grounding. She has described 13 Stems as a place where 'scent meets soul,' framing the eau de parfum as an earthy floral designed to ground and calm the wearer. This perspective extends back through the original Nyakio line, where Grieco has consistently centered her Kenyan heritage and the generational knowledge of the women in her family as the creative wellspring of the brand. The philosophy rejects the notion of beauty as purely aesthetic, instead treating products, including scent, as carriers of story and cultural memory. Grieco has spoken about wanting to share beauty rituals from her background with a wider audience, framing her work as an act of translation rather than invention. Her description of 13 Stems as meant to 'ground you, calm you, and bring' something further reinforces this grounding-as-purpose approach to fragrance creation. This vision also informs Grieco's broader entrepreneurial stance. Through Thirteen Lune and Relevant Skin, she has positioned herself as a builder of infrastructure for underrepresented beauty founders, suggesting that her creative philosophy extends beyond individual products to the structures that determine whose work gets seen and sold. The throughline across all her ventures is a belief that beauty brands rooted in specific cultural perspectives deserve both shelf space and storytelling room.