How 3 start-ups are changing Nigeria’s fashion landscape
Nigeria’s fashion industry has been in tremendous growth trajectory in recent years. Special focus has been on adult clothing line with little or no attention to children outfit.
But this is fast changing as some young entrepreneurs have identified the gap in the industry and are changing that for the country’s fashion landscape with African-theme clothing for children.
The young entrepreneurs are bringing in new innovations, designs and dexterity into the country’s fashion industry. Who and who are in the forefront of this?
Tejumola Maurice-Diva
Tejumola Maurice-Diva, founder and CEO of Toddler Clan Limited (TTC), a fashion outfit that specialises in children clothing only. Tejumola was inspired to establish her business when she couldn’t find quality, fashionable and affordable African clothing for her new born baby.
To change this for other mothers, Tejumola established TTC using experience and skills gained while working in the US as an associate designer. She also had previously undergone numerous trainings on fashion and designs.
“I choose to specialise in children wears because I was fairly strategic in determining to play where I had natural interests as well as a business that required relatively low start-up capital. Additionally, I think children are so much fun and being around them is so energetic,” she said.
She stated her business with N250,000 in 2015 and the business has grown tremendously since starting despite the economic downturn in the country. “I started with about N250,000 and my business is worth tens of multiples of that right now,” Tejumola said.
She has continued to get referrals from family, friends and associates which have helped build her business over the years since starting. Tejumola sources her fabrics from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Turkey and China.
The communication-graduate-turned- entrepreneur told Start-Up Digest that the biggest challenge facing her business is lack of a quality support ecosystem in the Nigerian business environment.
“No business exists in a vacuum. Apple would not be the raging success it is today without hardware vendors in China, third party marketing support in New York and favourable trade policies in Washington DC. In my business, I have to be my own primary power supply, my own primary marketer, my own primary tailor, my own primary banker and my own primary sales person. It is incredibly inefficient and unsustainable,” Tejumola said.
According to her, the government can address this challenge through the creation of functional entrepreneurship hubs, stressing that such hubs would help entrepreneurs pool resources, reduce tax burden and help encourage innovation.
In her words: “For starters, the government should create functional entrepreneurship hubs, smaller than tax-free zones and more practical than job centres. These hubs can help entrepreneurs pool resources, reduce tax burdens and encourage innovation.”
When asked about the role the fashion industry can play in the country’s diversification quest, Tejumola said, “The fashion and textile industry can play a very huge role. Both industries have not even begun to scratch the surface domestically, much less if we are able to turn them into major export and foreign earners like they do for countries like Thailand, Bangladesh and India.”
“It is a low-hanging fruit that we are pleading with the government to take a second look at,” she added.
Ugo Nwosu
Ugo Nwosu is the founder and chief executive officer of LOTACHI Limited, a fashion outfit for children. Ugo has a vast experience in the fashion industry, having started sewing at a very young age.
Ugo was inspired to start her fashion business when she identified a gap in children’s African wears. To fill the gap, she established LOTACHI in six months ago and named it after her niece. She started by making free dresses for her nieces as samples for other family members and friends, after which she began to get recommendations for business from them.
She started her business with less than N1, 000, which was spent on purchasing accessories. Ugo was lucky to have a mother who already had a sewing machine and some local fabrics which she started with.
Despite recession that is hitting Africa’s largest economy, Ugo’s business is growing stronger with a lot of prospects. She said that the recession has helped her make smarter decisions that have seen the business increase its sales and customer base within the few months of existence.
In her words, “Recession has taught me quite a bit. As a business, it has taught us to make smarter economic decisions like looking inwards for raw materials instead of importing, because we started by importing most of our fabrics.”
Ugo, an Industrial Physics graduate told Start-Up Digest that every new business needs to pass through three stages to survive. According to her, a lot of start-ups fail because they always want to jump from the first stage to the last stage.
“Your ability to go from stage one to stage one depends on the work you put in stage two and that’s the stage LOTACHI is at the moment. Even though, we have not started making profit from sales, we have enough to purchase supplies and produce merchandise conveniently,” Ugo said.
When asked some of the challenges her business is facing, she noted that the business is being badly affected by the irregular power supply in the country, which she stated is the fundamental problem hindering the country’s economic industrialisation and growth.
Also, she stated that the issue of sub-standard products in the fabric industry is a major challenge to her business. Ugo told Start-Up Digest that the Nigerian market for fabrics is flooded with a lot of substandard materials with low quality.
She called on the regulatory and standardisation agencies to ensure that the Nigerian market is protected from substandard products, urging them to learn from the Ghanaian agencies that have successfully ensured that fabrics in the country are of high quality standards.
Mimmi Nwosu
Mimmi Nwosu is the founder and chief executive officer of Mimi’s Kreationz Limited, a fashion outfit in Lagos. She is an experienced fashioner designer with nine years’ experience in the fashion industry.
Mimmi has always had the passion of putting her designs on her children. This made her acquire fashion skills immediately after her secondary education in 2008. After completing her University education, she started Mimi’s Kreationz in 2013 and, since then, she had trained over twenty people in designs and styles.
An economics-graduate-turned- entrepreneur, Mimmi started her business with an initial capital of N30, 000 which she used to acquire her first sewing machine and accessorie. Mimmi told Start-Up Digest that she raised the capital from her private savings, during her youth service year.
At the point of starting her business, Mimmi had to seek employment to raise additional capital to expand. She took up a job as a customer service agent for an e-commerce firm and continued to run her fashion business on weekends.
According to her, the e-commerce firm provided her a platform to sell her own products across the country, as she was marketing her designs through the medium. “I had the opportunity to project and sell my products using the business brand name ‘Mimi’s Kreationz’ to various customers nationwide under the e-commerce platform of the organisation I work,” she said.
Mimmi said the hunger for success in her made her enrol in a fashion school and for a post graduate programme to acquire more skills and creativity. She noted that creativity is the key for a successful fashion business, stressing that the business can only be sustained when the entrepreneur do things differently.
In her words, “The fashion industry in Nigeria is wide, insatiable and calling on the creative ones and those who can usher a new fashion culture.”
When asked how she has been surviving recession, Mimmi said her customer base has been on the rise, as patronage of her products has increased over the last year.
Josephine Okojie