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When sisters Nnadagi and Louise Isa started the Lor Company in 2020, their primary goal was to create household essentials that encouraged more Black people to live healthy and sustainable life styles. Bigger corporations, they believed, weren’t marketing to people who looked like them.
“We don’t want anymore harm,” Louise Isa said. “And we don’t like being left out as well, and we feel like more people would be able to join in on the change if they had access to it.”
The company gained a bit of fame after “CBS This Morning” featured their first product: lor tush, toilet paper made from bamboo instead of trees. “Lor“ is Baltimore slang for little and toilet paper is used to wipe the tush.
They got their first shipment from overseas manufacturers as the pandemic hit and everything shut down. They gave away the toilet paper, attracting national attention as the product was becoming alarmingly scarce on store shelves.
“We didn’t feel right selling with everybody struggling, so we decided to give it away. We hopped in our cars, we drove all around the city and just handed out free toilet paper,” said Nnadagi Isa.
Now the company is expanding into other products. Last weekend, they unveiled a new coffee brand, befor tush, and announced future plans for more environmentally sustainable products during an event at Good Neighbor, a Hampden cafe. Customers got to taste the coffee and see the material and design for their next sustainable product: shoes made from algae called lor slips. The algae is converted into plastic-like pellets, melted into material resembling an EVA foam, and then injected into a mold of the shoe.
“Big things are coming!” Louise Isa said.
The Lor Company has grown considerably in operations and personnel since the sisters began in a 1,000-square-foot storage space in downtown Baltimore.
Now the company operates at The Creek, a much larger warehouse space located inside the Union Collective in Hampden. The sisters have also expanded into a team of five. With the increased storage space and personnel, the company’s order-to-ship process has gotten smoother.
“It’s actually awesome because we’re able to do more,” Nnadagi Isa said. “We started with one idea, which was toilet paper, and now that we’ve built our team larger, we’re able to tackle more and get more people introduced to a sustainable lifestyle through our other products that we’re launching.”
In the spirit of community service that the Lor Company is known for, the sisters look for the best people to partner with when making new products.
“Even with our slides, I’m thinking ‘how can we collaborate with a high school or middle school where they have to wear uniforms?’” Nnadagi said. “Not everybody [can afford] the cost for the uniforms, so let’s give them some shoes to match the uniform.”
The company’s first coffee flavor is a “high-voltage caffeine” bean called “Geekin.’”
The idea for the name of the entire coffee brand, befor tush, was pitched to them by Joel Anderson and Jimmy Richards, owners of Anderson Strategy and Bay Central Media, respectively. The coffee’s name alludes to the belief that coffee drinking can give people the urge to to poop. Unless there’s a bidet in the household, the pairing of befor lor and lor tush a symbiotic and cyclical one.
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“As an entrepreneur myself, I wanted to work with people like that,” Anderson said. “Every time I see people like Nnadagi and Louise making their vision a reality, it makes me proud to be a part of the Baltimore business community.”
He and Richards got together to brainstorm name ideas they could pitch to the Lor Company, and thought “it would be funny if the toilet paper company spun off into coffee,” Anderson said.
Louise Isa thought that the pitch for the coffee name pitch was initially an April Fool’s joke, but after discussing with her sister went with it.
“To their credit, they didn’t think we were crazy,” said Anderson. “They had all the manufacturing and product knowledge, so they were game for it and kind of took it and ran with it.”
After that, she and her sister spent a long day of shooting with Anderson and Richards to produce a video announcement. The video’s theme was inspired by childhood shows like “Dexter’s Laboratory,” complete with the lab setting, lab coats, beakers and humorous word scheming. The sisters sourced the coffee and designed the packaging.
Good Neighbor Operations Director Rida Shahbaz said the cafe hosted the coffee launch event because they like to support products from diverse creators, like the Black-and-women owned Lor Company.
“Everyone, every day is constantly making decisions to support different companies, different groups of people, and I know that here at Good Neighbor we truly think about it,” Shahbaz said.
The coffee event featured beakers filled with Gatorade, lab coats for participants, a microscope and a material sample of the algae pellets that the company will use for their shoes.
Many of those who tried the coffee — hot and iced — said that they liked it.
“The coffee is very good. I drink black coffee, so I can try to make sure I’ve got a good gauge on what’s happening,” said DJ Sean J., a musician based in Baltimore. “It’s mild, there’s no bitterness, no acidity, and [it’s] smooth and good for the summertime.”
Christopher Shannon, the managing director for Community Concerts at Second, tried the cocktail version of Geekin.’ He said “it was sweet, and it had a little bit of depth to it without being overly saccharine.”
“For the name like Geekin,’ I was kind of expecting a little bit more of a bite, but it’s actually really smooth,” said Cocoa Chiosi, a retail experience manager at the Corner Store Gift Shop who also works for Kiss Tomorrow Hello.
aaron.wright@thebaltimorebanner.com
This story was updated to correct Joel Anderson and Jimmy Richards' involvement in The Lor Company. They helped come up with a name for the coffee brand.
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Aaron Wright is a newsroom intern at The Baltimore Banner. His job is to tell stories about the city of Baltimore. He currently attends the University of Maryland, College Park, studying in journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. He gained his experience from working at The Black Explosion.
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