Sunny Hone Home: The Story Under the Lid

There's something extra sweet under this lid! Sunny Honey Home was co-created with 8 entrepreneurs with refugee backgrounds.

We sat down with two Sunny Honey Home co-creators, Fatma and Laila, to hear about their experience of creating the flavour and how they put what they learnt into practice in their own businesses.

Serial entrepreneur, Fatma Al-Baiti, is the founder of the Yemeni pop-up brunch series ‘Meet me at Fatma's', co-founder and communications lead at Your ECHO, and a social media specialist. She is also an Up Collective graduate and one of the Sunny Honey Home’s co-creators. 

Here Fatma shares her experience in designing the ice cream flavour and how it has helped her entrepreneur journey,

Laila Majeed, UP Collective graduate, and founder of ethical skincare brand, Gilguzi, was one of the 8 refugee entrepreneurs who co-created Sunny Honey Home. She is now working as a Finance Officer in the Educational Sector.  Laila tells us about her experience and how she’s putting the learnings into practice in her own business - a social enterprise on a mission to help people suffering from dermatological skin conditions to have healthier and more hydrated skin, while caring for the earth.

As an entrepreneur, I am always open to new learning opportunities so when I heard about the opportunity to work alongside Ben & Jerry’s to design a new ice cream, I jumped at the chance to learn some new skills that could help me on my own business journey. 

As Gilguzi grows, we aim to improve access to employment for refugee women through flexible employment and training opportunities. Being part of the Sunny Honey Home co-creation process helped me realise that nothing is impossible. One of the biggest comparisons I made was seeing that Sunny Honey Home was made by a very big company, but I was creating my sunscreen on my own. It gave me this awesome idea of what you can achieve when you have all those resources available and how my business can grow in the future with investment.

Despite being a very different type of product, the experience showed me how the process of product development works, and it helped me understand the steps I could also be taking with my own business. All the entrepreneurs involved in designing Sunny Honey Home learnt new, transferable skills and most importantly, we all had fun working alongside other refugees along the way. The fact that a company like Ben & Jerry’s trusted us and made us part of this whole design process really gave us the motivation and the energy that we could do something good. We were equal contributors of the project, not ‘beneficiaries’ and I would like to see more companies give hands-on opportunities like this to refugees.

The project has also had a wider impact because proceeds from each tub go to support refugee-led businesses. I think that this brings hope and motivation in a different way to other refugees who weren’t part of the process, but they know that there is ice cream sitting in people’s freezers at home that tells our story. It might give them hope that with each tub we are reaching at least one person, somewhere in the world or in the UK.

To read Laila’s full interview, visit https://www.up-collective.com/stories/sunny-honey-home-one-year

To stay in the loop with Gilguzi, follow their Instagram here.