Episode: 24 — "Just Do It" · Full Episode #24
Date: 2 June 2020 (Season 3)
Language: English and Libyan Arabic
Recorded in: Remote (London)
Malak Ben Hmeda (ملاك بن حميدة) is a Libyan entrepreneur and the founder of Oh My Gum, a plant-based, plastic-free, premium chewing gum brand. Born in Tripoli in Hay Al-Andalus, she attended the International School of Tripoli and later studied psychology at the University of Surrey. She worked in fashion and luxury recruitment for six years before quitting to build Oh My Gum. At the time of recording she was based in London. The episode is also notable for the first baby guest in Damiri's history — her daughter Maya, six weeks old, who stayed quiet for the full forty-plus minutes.
Ben Hmeda decided to stop eating meat at the age of four, after witnessing something at a family gathering. The household she grew up in functioned as a small zoo: five dogs, more than ten cats (her grandmother tossed tuna balls onto the roof to feed strays), a hamster, two tortoises, and nineteen birds — the last number the product of two birds breeding unchecked.
Libyan cultural lore held that left-handedness meant "the devil eats with her." Ben Hmeda's reply as a child was that her devil must be very fat. She refused to switch hands and describes the incident as the first blueprint for her later instinct to ignore what people think.
See: Left-Handed Devil
Ben Hmeda narrowed an initial list of twenty-five business ideas using two filters: whether she could physically make the product herself with her hands, and whether she was obsessed enough with it to bore everyone around her about it every day. Oh My Gum was the only idea that survived both tests.
Walking through supermarket gum aisles she noticed that the category looked like cleaning products — dark greens, blues, industrial design. She decided gum should look like a beauty product, with packaging resembling lipstick.
Her mother's original suggestion was "Mystic Gum." This was shortened to OMG and then expanded into Oh My Gum.
Early emails to manufacturers went unanswered. After she bought a business email domain, responses arrived — but several suppliers had read her name as the masculine "Malik" and were surprised to find a woman on the other end of the phone.
At the University of Surrey, the shared kitchen was once set on fire by a student boiling rice in a kettle. Ben Hmeda's food kept being stolen from the communal fridge. The theft stopped only when she started making Libyan stew (tbayakh) — on the grounds, she jokes, that "English people don't steal ethnic food."
See: Oh My Gum
"Don't strive for perfect. Strive for finished and highly acceptable." (EP 24)
"My devil must be very fat." (EP 24)