Between Fisher's Deli and the Produce Patch Pickle Bar, locals dawdle in a small booth at Broad Street Market in Harrisburg. All-natural body butters, soaps, serums, and medicinal herbs line the shelves.
One customer, blissfully unaware of the reporter just six feet behind her, rambles on about the shop's raw African black soap, her latest attempt in a long line of acne treatments, and the only one that worked. Even behind a mask, you can tell that Chanele House—creator of Shea Optimum and a local to York—is smiling.
"My business is not about sales. My business is about building lasting relationships," Chanele says as she rounds down to the nearest dollar for a customer so they didn't have to scrounge up coins.
Chanele's most popular creations are her whipped shea body butters, and she always keeps a full range of scents on tap. She sources her ingredients through a fair trade company in northern Ghana, one of the top nations in the world for the shea tree. And when someone from West Africa makes their way to her stand, Chanele says they can sniff out her product's authenticity in a second.
While the base ingredient of shea butter remains the same, Chanele changes up the scents on a whim. She gives them names like Peace of Mind, Endurance, and Good Vibes, all because—as she says—"There's power in what we speak."
"Every month, my customers never know what they're gonna get," says Chanele.
As successful as her self care business is today—with her products in retail stores across the region and her place in Broad Street Market three times a week—it took Chanele a long time to get it off the ground. Just when she began building her ideas, she halted.
"I stopped because of fear of the unknown, the fear of being a business owner, not knowing that's what God desired for me to do," Chanele says. "One thing I learned in life is that fear will paralyze a person and, in turn, they become stuck. That's what happened to me."
But when a prophetess at church told Chanele she has an entrepreneur inside of her, something changed.
"Once I got that revelation, that's when the fear started to go down," she says. "Once what was inside of me came out, people gravitated towards it."
Shea Optimum is a business rooted in inclusivity of all ethnicities and genders. Years ago, Chanele donned natural hair—the same hair that's now in locs—and sold hair products. But in the long run, she wanted a business that could serve everybody. She switched to shea butter, something Chanele knew everyone could love.
And it worked.
"My customers that I have today are the same customers that I had three years ago. And my customer base is still growing," says Chanele. Even in the early days, when her packaging consisted of basic plastic containers with simple stickers on the lid, her customers proved that it's what's on the inside that counts.
"They all loved them and wanted to buy them, and they all gave me words of encouragement," Chanele says. When the COVID-19 pandemic left small business owners everywhere reeling, Chanele worried—but this time, she didn't let fear stop her. As Shea Optimum grows, Chanele continues to drive tractor trailer trucks full of mail for the United States Postal Service, something she once did for 13 hours a day while getting her business off the ground.
Even today, she leaves the Broad Street Market at 5 p.m. just to start driving shipments by 5:45. "To this day, I still can't say I have established a balance where I'm comfortable or where I've mastered time management, because I haven't," says Chanele. "Anything can happen out on the road. Anything can happen when it comes to my products."
All things considered, Shea Optimum continues to evolve. In addition to her shea butters, you'll find bulk herbs on her shelves at the market. For Chanele, these herbs are a natural alternative to pharmaceuticals. A budding herbalist, she doles out mugwort and more by the ounce—along with knowledge on how, and why, to use each herb.
She now partners with Fox Haven Farm and Learning Center in Frederick County, MD to volunteer and provide CSA members with shea butter.
So what's different? What is it that keeps her going, keeps her from succumbing to that fear that once paralyzed her?
"If it wasn't for my faith, I would've lost my mind a long time ago," says Chanele, adding that perseverance really does pay off.
To Chanele, her body butters, herbs and, yes, even handcrafted yoni oils are more than just products to be sold. "There are a lot of people suffering with mental issues," Chanele says. "And they mask it. They internalize it. So I wanted to have a brand that spoke life."
When the steady stream of familiar faces stops rolling through the market halls in the evening and they turn off the lights of that big brick building, there are some things Chanele always keeps in mind.
"I want to be as creative as I can be, as loving, as transparent," she says. "I desire to be a light in a dark world."
Shea Optimum
Broad Street Market | 1233 N 3rd Street Harrisburg, PA 17102 | sheaoptimum.com