Sabrina Elba wears many hats. She’s a model, fashion icon, actress and philanthropist. But she’s also building a community around her skincare brand that is getting international recognition.

In a world inundated with white-labelled celebrity brands, Elba’s S’Able Labs took two and half years of rigorous product development before hitting the market. Just shy of three years since its launch, Elba says the brand is going from strength to strength – and they’re only just getting started.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t something Elba has always wanted. But she suffered with acne-prone skin at high school in Canada in the early 2000s and had found there wasn’t a lot of information on how to deal with issues with black skin.

“I remember thinking I was the problem,” Elba recalls. “I was buying into a lot of brands that weren’t necessarily buying into me.”

After a flair-up again in her 30s, she started experiencing the same issues with her skin and was shocked to see how little progress had been made. The education was there but Elba still felt that products weren’t quite hitting the mark.

“Melanin-rich skin is, unfortunately, seen as niche, so products aren’t necessarily made to treat as a priority. If you’re not addressing issues because you’ve seen them as niche, you’re ignoring a massive part of the population.”

Elba decided to flip the conventional wisdom and address the most sensitive subgroup first, as addressing their needs can benefit everyone. She likens it to shampoo, where a product for damaged hair can also help those who don’t have hair in this condition.

She launched S’Able Labs in 2022 with her husband, the actor Idris Elba. But this was a time when the market was saturated with celebrity brands. However, unlike some celebrity brands, the products in Elba’s range are not white labelled but instead have been through stringent sourcing and testing. It is important to them to do more than just put their faces to a product.

“I was super passionate about highlighting African ingredients,” Elba says. “Not because it was trendy USP, or because Idris and I are African. It was actually because, in the way that we were approaching the formulations being catered to melanin-rich skin, we knew they had to be packed with antioxidants. The best antioxidants come from Africa.”

The harsh and diverse African climates mean that the botanicals have to be extremely resilient. Elba’s philanthropic work, including her role as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, inspired her to make sure that the raw materials were responsibly sourced. However, this was more difficult than expected.

In some cases, they had to go as far as finding the farmer, helping them fill out the safety sheets and getting the ingredients tested to allow them to be sold in Europe. They also struggled to find a lab to test the products due to their preference of only working with trusted vendors and people that they traditionally partner with. These measures ended up delaying the brand’s launch by six months.

One characteristic from Elba’s advocacy work that has improved her leadership is the ability to never accept no as an answer. She says: “I always think that if you hear no, you’re talking to the wrong person. Not to say something bad against someone, it’s just that they haven’t seen the opportunity or the solution. It’s given me this resilience to think that there probably is a way to do it.”

Another piece of her character s the effect her mother Maryam Egal had on her work ethic. Having been a humanitarian most of Elba’s life, Egal would frequently travel to her native Somalia to supply water to rural area. She is also the president and founder of the Hooyo Maryam Foundation, which helps people learn valuable farming skills. But what stands out to Elba is her mother’s willingness to get her hands dirty.

“That’s definitely inspired a lot of my working life,” she says. “I always tell people that if you’re in a start-up, job descriptions go out the window. Everyone is doing everything. Do not think that you can be a CEO in a growing company and sit in your office and not go to the events, do the Canva graphics or upload something on social media – that’s just not going to work.”

Elba admits that juggling many responsibilities can be overwhelming. “I’m so happy and honoured that I’ve been able to do all I’ve been able to do,” she says, “but there is a reality that not everything will have the same amount of time because you just cannot physically be everywhere at once.

“Sometimes something will suffer, whether it’s your home life or a project that you want to pick up that you can no longer do. But I think it becomes a very good litmus test for the things that you actually want to do. These are the things that you will subconsciously be putting more time and energy into.”

S’able Labs has a growing team but leadership is an element of Elba’s character she’s had to nurture. She likens her approach to managing people to the five love languages theory used in relationships. She gets to know employees’ characters to help get the most out of them but also has regular feedback meetings to keep the business on track. 

There’s been a steep learning curve when it comes to the messaging of S’able Labs’ offering too. Elba recalls that they flooded their communications when the brand launched in 2022.

“There was so much to talk about but we learnt that actually maybe that was too much. You need to have refined messaging,” she says. “That was a hard realisation for me because I thought we were doing everything right but you really have to distil that. What is the one thing that you will be talking about again and again? Something that you can put on your website and you can put on your social media? For us, the distilling of that messaging took a long time but when we got it right our growth was astronomical.”

Success is more than the balance sheet to Elba. Since tapping into this relatively untouched African beauty market, she’s been inundated with consumers thanking her for shining a spotlight on African ingredients, such as okra. She closes our discussion with a challenge to business leaders: to engage with their community.

“It’s impossible to sit in an office and understand how you can connect to a community that you haven’t been around,” Elba says. “I do think there’s a lack of engagement that happens between business and community and I don’t quite understand why that is. I think there’s a lot of boardroom planning that happens around engagement that doesn’t actualise where the community is. I believe that’s the wrong way to do it. Make sure that you are attending events, making room and spaces for your community to show up to.”