ārai was established in 2022 by a small group of girls from Wellington East Girls' College. As a part of the Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme and our business curriculum, we were asked to create a unique product or service and take it to the market. We couldn't think of a unique product or service for a long time until we landed upon the idea of an SPF Dry Shampoo. We found that 13% of skin cancers are found on the scalp, 2-5% of which are melanomas revealing that it is a relevant problem that we needed to solve.
Our experiences with irritated scalps have always been extremely prominent. Whether we were reading in the hot sun, hanging at the beach or playing sports outdoors, this all resulted in us having itchy, scabbing and inflamed scalps as a result of sunburn. It didn't take long for us to identify that this is not only an annoying problem but a dangerous problem.
We searched for a solution and found that there was nothing on the Aotearoa market that would meet all of our requirements, thus ārai was born!
