How Majiri Otobo makes millions from natural hair products

Majiri Otobo is the chief executive officer of Kui Care, a start-up that provides a range of personal products designed for natural hair.

Majiri was inspired to establish Kui Care out of her desire to promote Nigerian brands and passion for hair care. Her dream has always been to be an entrepreneur promoting African-led ideas and businesses. Therefore, her launch of KUI is a dream come true.

“My passion for hair care began when I decided to be natural. After my own personal hair journey began, I realised that the opportunity to develop this same journey had not been achieved in the African market,” Majiri cheerily says.

The engineer-turned-entrepreneur started Kui Care in 2013 and got her product licence in 2016 from the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC).

The Imperial College graduate had had three years’ experience in a global food manufacturing company as a process engineer before moving back to Nigeria to establish the beauty care line.

Majiri tells Start-Up-Digest that she derived her brand identity KUI from ‘Bai Kui’, which means ‘star’ in her native Ijaw language.

She raised her initial start-up capital from her previous job. “My seed capital was a few millions I had saved while working and also raised from my personal network” Majiri says.

Prior to establishing Kui Care, Majiri had attended a lot of conferences on beauty products to have a proper understanding of the industry and the procedure involved in operating a beauty line product.

“Attending the National Youth Service Corp helped me to better understand the market, the potentials in the industry and how much people are willing to spend on hair products” she states.

“Importing from Asia was going to increase our cost and of course prices, which does not sit well with what we wanted to do. Besides, getting NAFDAC number for an imported product is a lot more complicated,” she explains.

After trying for a year and a half and failing at producing in Asia to import into Nigeria, Majiri had to look for ways to start producing locally.

As a result, she started making hair butter. It was handmade and offered her the opportunity of testing how the market was going to respond. In the process, she was calling different packaging companies, and in doing that realised it was going to cost less in comparison with the former option of importing from Asia. “Yes, it is cheaper here if you find the right packaging.

“By the time I decided to produce locally, I had already made some hair cream and felt the market pulse with relevant feedbacks. I needed to commit to the required volumes and the whole process of doing that gave me insight into what I needed to do if I were to go large scale,” Otobo narrates.

After this, Majiri started looking for local partners that could manufacture properly. “I searched for local containers, labelling and others. This cut out the middle men. I finally got my NAFDAC number in June, 2016. This was also when the market really started to go crazy. The naira’s value dropped and I was very glad I had stayed local, because I was dealing with local currency,” she recounts.

Speaking on the challenges confronting the business, Majiri says poor electricity supply and the high cost of logistics are main issues.

Inconsistent electricity provision raises the production costs borne by businesses.

The entrepreneur is hurt by poor and underdeveloped transport systems, and wants the government to fix these problems to enable businesses have a breath of fresh air.

STEPHEN ONYEKWELU