misaj

Celebrating female-founded brands you'll want to know.

Since November 2025, we've been spotlighting the next generation of female-founded consumer brands and celebrating female entrepreneurship, showing that building a business is a real, viable career path for women from all walks of life, regardless of background, age, culture, or circumstance.

We started Mindful Brand to support women in succeeding in business - not just through what we do, but also in how we shop. We believe in a future where more seven-figure consumer brands are built by women, and we're committed to helping make that vision a reality.

Deciding which businesses to support is a personal choice.

If, like us, you prefer to champion female-owned brands, we hope you enjoy this series.

Today, we’re featuring misaj, founded by Amèle Moussaoui in 2025 in Paris, France.

About the Brand

misaj is protective skincare built around exposure: what skin meets the moment it leaves the bathroom. It turns mosquito protection into a body cream you'd keep next to your perfume. It has the texture, scent and pleasure of a real skincare ritual. Glow Protect hydrates, supports the skin barrier and protects, in one daily step.

The brand is for people who live fully and outdoors, from morning swims to flights across time zones. They care about texture, scent and how a product makes them feel, and refuse to choose between pleasure and protection. They see self-care as a way of living, not an extra step.

misaj is formulated with a pharmacist's rigour and made in France, with the sensoriality of fine skincare. One cream hydrates the skin every day of the year and protects it wherever life takes you.

Meet the Founder

Amèle is a solo, first-time founder based in Paris. A pharmacist by training, she has Algerian, Moroccan and French roots and an Amazigh heritage she carries into everything misaj does.

Before founding the brand, she worked in M&A at Servier and in strategy at McKinsey. She runs the brand hands-on, from formulation to fundraising.

Healing runs through her family: an Amazigh healer great-grandmother, a mother practising traditional medicine and a surgeon father. misaj is that lineage distilled through science.

How She Started

Amèle's story began with her great-grandmother and her mother. Their daily rituals, the tea and the care after the shower, were acts of protection as much as pleasure.

Growing up, she learned the idea behind Chinese medicine: a doctor's job is to keep you from getting sick, not to treat you once you are.

Then she watched mosquito-borne disease spread across Europe while everyone around her refused the sticky, chemical-smelling sprays on offer.

So she asked a simple question: why isn't protection part of the ritual we already love? She put it inside a body cream, and misaj was born.

What She Learned

Amèle has learned to be the leader of one thing before trying to be present in ten.

As founders, it's tempting to expand quickly, with more products, more categories and more markets, because it looks like progress.

But real strength comes from owning one problem completely and becoming the reference for it.

Where to shop

misaj is available to buy at misajskin.com, Oli's Lab, Caspian (Menorca), Uma & Los Enamorados (Ibiza), Hotel Corazon (Mallorca), Tatoi Club (Athens) and Atelier Zoé (Maastricht).

Instagram: @misaj.paris

Support brands built by women. Don’t just say it. Shop it. Stock it. Fund it.