‘Recession has helped our fashion outfit make smarter business decisions’
Ugo Nwosu is the founder and chief executive officer of LOTACHI Limited, a fashion outfit for children. Ugo has had a good experience in the fashion industry, having started sewing at a very young age.
She was inspired to start her fashion business when she identified a gap in children’s African wears. To fill the gap, she established LOTACHI 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. Thereafter, Ugo began to get recommendations for business from family and friends.
She started her business with less than N1,000, which was spent to purchase some 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 had prompted her to make smarter decisions that had 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 needed to pass through three stages to survive. According to her, a lot of start-ups failed because they always wanted 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 what some of the challenges her business faced were, she noted that the business was being badly affected by irregular power supply in the country, which she stated was 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 was a major challenge to her business. Ugo told Start-up Digest that the Nigerian market for fabrics was flooded with a lot of substandard materials with low quality.
She called on the regulatory and standardisation agencies to ensure that the Nigerian market was protected from substandard products, urging them to learn from the Ghanaian agencies that had successfully ensured that fabrics in the country were of high quality standards.
When asked what she would tell her younger self, Ugo said, ”Just do it!’ When you have an idea, write it down, be proactive and begin to run with it.”
The young entrepreneur told Start-up Digest that she had continued to upgrade her skills in designs and creativity. Ugo stated that LOTACHI was aflaot because of creativity and the ability to meet customers deadlines.
“We strive not to take our eyes off the focus. We are constantly in competition with ourselves to be better and so far we have not let our customers down because the quality, detail and style are what keeps them coming back,” she said.
Josephine Okojie