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Founder: Rawinia Rimene
Brand: Girl Native
Category: Indigenous beauty and skincare
One Liner: Natural, authentic, mātauranga Māori–based skincare for sensitive skin and inclusive beauty
Stage: Founded 2019 → Bootstrapped → Now distributed across NZ, AU, UK, US, EU, Middle East, and luxury hotel partners
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When Rawinia’s newborn daughter developed a severe rash, prescription creams only worsened it. Drawing on mātauranga Māori, she made a kawakawa balm in her kitchen — within 48 hours, the rash was gone. That moment lit the spark for Girl Native.
With just $100, she built a Shopify site and ran Facebook ads. Within three months she had turned that $100 into $10,000 of sales. The early traction, fuelled by authentic storytelling and direct community engagement, set Girl Native on a journey from home-kitchen batches to global recognition.
**Girl Native makes natural, culturally authentic skincare that blends indigenous knowledge with modern beauty expectations.** Its rise has been scrappy and demanding: scaling through trial and error, surviving cashflow squeezes, and learning discipline in SKUs and systems. Today the brand stands as an indigenous beauty label with international reach and aspirations of building New Zealand’s first indigenous-led skincare lab.
⚡️ Girl Native has grown from a $100 experiment to a globally recognised indigenous beauty brand by leaning into authenticity, telling its story online, and surviving cash crunches with grit.
“It all started because my daughter’s skin was breaking out and nothing worked. Kawakawa did — and I realised this knowledge needed to be shared.”
“People saw me making it, packaging it, posting it — they came along for the ride.”