Behind The Beauty: Founder Nyakio Grieco Is Bringing Thirteen Lune To South Africa

Wins, Losses, and Acquisitions

Taking Back Ownership of Thirteen Lune

Expanding to South Africa

Grieco’s Personal Relationship to South Africa

Her Advice to Black Founders Facing Challenges

The Products She’s Investing In

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Nyakio Grieco tells ESSENCE all about her wins, losses, and why she’s expanding Thirteen Lune to South Africa.

Welcome to Behind The Beauty. Here, we highlight Black women in beauty who are taking the industry by storm and making history in their own right. Everyone from rising beauty brand founders, to behind-the-scenes PR mavens discusses their career journeys, biggest inspirations, and more.

Nyakio Grieco is taking Thirteen Lune in a new direction (literally). After being acquired by SNR Capital in 2024, just four years after co-founding the inclusive beauty retailer, Grieco took back ownership just a few months ago. Now, as CEO, she’s expanding the brand from Los Angeles to South Africa later this month in an unexpected move.

Partnering with the multi-billion dollar platform, Takealot, “it's a very full circle moment,” she tells ESSENCE. As a country her late father, a historian, used to advocate for anti-apartheid in, “I want our community, especially women of color, to know we're still here, we're standing, and we're growing even stronger and taking up more space.”

Ahead, Nyakio Grieco tells ESSENCE all about her wins, losses, and why she’s expanding Thirteen Lune to South Africa.

“It's been a journey over the last couple of years,” says Grieco. Founded in 2020, Thirteen Lune was born out of her desire to make the beauty industry more inclusive. But, “between all of the stops and starts, all the way to the acquisition of Nyakio Beauty at Unilever, it was challenging.”

While she says the past few years had big wins, “falling down and learning how to embrace failure and understanding the only failure was not getting back up” was a lesson she had to learn. As a fast-growing platform, Thirteen Lune featured over 160 diverse brands. Then, after the pullback on DEI in late 2023, many of those same brands shut down.

“It almost made our work more important because now we were in a situation where some of our most culturally diverse brands were shutting down, not being able to meet inventory, not being able to stay on shelf,” she recalled. To the extent, in December 2024, Thirteen Lune was acquired by SNR Capital through a bankruptcy alternative process. Then, in 2025, the retailer’s partnership with JCPenney ended.

Now, as of August of this year, Grieco is back as the CEO of the retailer she co-founded six years ago. “Making the choice to take what I built back, step into the CEO seat with the support of my investors that have rolled with me in every stage of Thirteen Lune, [and] continuing to build my own team is hard to put into words what it means to me,” she says.

Sticking to the same goal she set in 2020, building generational wealth through beauty is what’s still pushing her business forward. “Looking at our consumers, specifically Black and brown women who shop the most in beauty, we just have to keep going and we have to be even bolder.”

For Grieco, the next step in rebuilding Thirteen Lune is taking the retailer from Los Angeles to an entirely different continent. “Thirteen Lune is heading to Africa,” she says. South Africa, to be exact. “We are going into a business with the largest retail platform, a multi-billion dollar platform called Takealot .” The digital platform has existed for about 15 years and is comparable to Amazon. Except, in South Africa, she says Takealot is much bigger.

The partnership will begin with 19 brands on November 18th, followed by pop-ups in Cape Town and Johannesburg similar to their flagship store on Larchmont Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Born in Upstate New York to Kenyan immigrants, Grieco’s father worked as a historian in the States. “My father, when I was little, spent so much time working through anti-apartheid,” she says. From writing books in South Africa to guest teaching at the University of Johannesburg in his sabbaticals, “it was a place where he saw the future of what equity looks like.”

After her father’s passing, she says it’s not lost on her that she’s launching in a country where his impact lives in. “On a personal level, that means the world to me,” she says. With Takealot hyper-focused on inclusivity and an equitable circular economy, she says her South African customers are hungry to get their hands on brands, from A-Beauty and K-Beauty to celebrity-founded brands.

“I've had the great privilege of finding the right investors,” she says with over 20 years being an entrepreneur. As she’s actively kicking off a $15 million dollar raise, she says her most important advice is knowing what the wrong investor looks like, but also, knowing who your people are.

When she first started raising funds for her first-ever brand, “I felt like I was coming from a place of needing the check just so the brand can survive,” she says. “But, in certain instances, checking my self-worth at the door.” As a founder, she’s gotten a lot of no’s, but investors like BrainTrust and Fearless Fund have stuck by her side from the beginning.

“I say to my mentees all the time, there's smart money and there's dumb money,” she says. “And, as someone who's taken some dumb money, you earn every penny.” Now, over 20 years in, protecting her equity means surrounding herself with the right type of investors. To the point, she’s even planning on expanding to New York next.

“I was an A-Beauty founder since 2002 before anybody was calling it A-Beauty,” she says. Every product she’s developed since starting her career comes from the beauty secrets she learned from her grandmother, who was a coffee farmer, and grandfather, who was a medicine man.

In her latest launch for Relevant Beauty, for example, the Pucker Up Lip Oil Treatment is formulated with the healing properties of hydrating oils she learned over 20 years ago. In the same breath, she relaunched her original skincare products with even more African ingredients than before, including vanilla coffee, sugar cane, and papaya. “They're better than ever,” she says. “I’m really leaning into my heritage.” After all, “that is how this all started.”

Full story sourced from ESSENCE. Read the original article for the publisher's complete coverage.