Start-Up-Digest has ranked entrepreneurs’ interview in 2018 on our weekly section and here are some business ideas that we think were outstanding in 2018.
Bathkandy
Bathkandy was founded by Blondie Okpuzor. Her business idea was unique because she creates soaps, lotions and other beauty, skin care and household products using unconventional raw materials such as jollof rice, goat milk, garri, coffee, and chocolate.
Blondie set up the company in December 2014.
Her candles are unconventional and look like desserts. The soaps, candles, lotions are regular products but they look differently, like ice cream soups.
“We have over 50 different types of soap. We infuse different things. We never had the same soap design twice. Every time you come, things look different. It is the same thing, but it looks different,” she explained to Start-Up Digest in May last year.
“We have goat milk lotions, made from goat milk. We have scrubs made from garri, coffee, and chocolate,” she discloses.
“They are all manufactured here in Nigeria. I make them by hand and we infuse delicious things like oils, tea, chocolates.
“Recently we just made soap from jollof rice. We are using local ingredients to make them. We have found that there are a lot of natural things that are there for you, but if you don’t know or use them, then you don’t get the benefits. So, we merge science with arts,” she asserted.
Her products make the skin look better and her packaging products come from locally recycled materials. As a mark of expansion, she set up a second store in Abuja in 2016.
She is looking more internationally—to Ghana, Kenya and South Africa, because these are the biggest beauty markets in Africa.
Blondie mentors younger entrepreneurs through her BathKandy University.
“We teach people how to make skin care products and start their own business. What we have found is that even though it is easy to start a skin care business, there are so many details that people do not have. Social media is a great thing. I have people who want me to mentor them and I do that. Everything I learnt was literally trial and error, so I won’t like others to go through that.”
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Madame Coquette/Fula Farms
The 35-year-old Bello produces what she calls Madame Coquette (MC), which is a line of handbags and small leather goods. She set up this business 10 years ago.
She uses local raw materials like snakes and crocodiles in making these bags. She buys snakes and crocodiles and uses them as raw materials. The entrepreneur also uses locally available leather in making bags, importing some from other countries.
“We use indigenous snake and crocodile skins from Kano and Kaduna. We hand- dye and colour the skins we use in making these products,” she told Start-up Digest in July 2018.
Her products have been sold in North America and Europe.
“I didn’t start with a lot of capital. I got a N30, 000 loan from my sister to start my business,” she said.
She also founded Fula Farms in early 2015. This farm, located in Lekki part of Lagos, boasts of over 50 cows. Hoawa produces milk, cheese and the local ‘fura’. A number of women make both ends meet from Fula Farms.
“Most of the women were home makers and their primary objective was to take care of their children. They didn’t have a source of income and most of their time was spent in their homes. A majority of them were nursing mothers. I decided to change the scope of the business and tailor it to empower the women in the community we work in,” she said.
“We have 90 percent female workforce. The farm stands as one of the few dairy farms in Lagos and it supplies small businesses and individuals with raw (fresh) milk and locally produced cheese,” she disclosed.
X3M Group
This business was founded by Steve Babaeko, who is the CEO of X3M Group, made up of X3M Ideas, X3M Music, and Zero Degrees, among others. His business is waxing strong at a time when many of its peers are struggling and going out of business.
Babeko is an advertising/ branding/ marketing guru who has also delved into audio-visual production and record label, with clear-cut plans to diversify into other countries.
Within few years of starting, he has set up offices in Accra, Johannesburg and Lusaka, among others, winning a couple of pan-African awards.
“I am really excited because we are the only local agency in the country today operating at that regional level. We are like trailblazers, if you like. We are sort of experimenting and paving the way for other agencies on the continent to be able to go this route,” he told Start-Up Digest last month.
Keexs
Jide Ipaye is the founder of Keexs Footwear, an African- inspired range of casual footwear such as sneakers and smart shoes. Jide’s Keexs is the first innovative and social footwear brand in Nigeria and the African continent.
He is focused on building a world-class footwear brand with manufacturing set-up in Nigeria, with a sole aim of creating economic empowerment opportunities for thousands of Africans, especially Nigerians.
A Microbiology graduate of the University of Lagos, Jide was inspired to set-up Keexs by a personal challenge. He hardly found his size of shoes in the market and rarely got the designs he loved.
As a result, he thought of making his own shoes to address this challenge and help others facing the same problem. He saw it as an opportunity to make a change rather than a perennial problem without a solution.
“Keexs started out as a personal challenge for me. Being a size 48, I hardly got my size and when I eventually did, they were not exactly the style I liked. I have been dealing with this problem for almost 40 years, so I said to myself, ‘Why don’t I start making my own shoes and also helping others?”
“I took the first step in conducting a research and went to a school in the Netherlands to learn how to design and manufacture sneakers. I did not want to focus on regular shoes.”
After his studies in the Netherlands, he came back to Nigeria and established Keexs in December 2015. Finance was a major challenge for Jide, but he was able to successfully jump the hurdle when he found a website called Kick Starter, a online-based US funding platform for creative projects.
Jide put up a video with a write-up that told a story of his challenges, looking at the Nigerian context, saying what the challenges were and how the problem of unemployment in the economy could be solved by looking internally and creating value through manufacturing.
And in forty days, Jide was able to raise $20,000 from the website to start his business. “Over a period of 40 days from November 2015 to December, we raised $20,000. The money was paid to the manufacturer to produce the first batch of the sneakers,” he said.
When asked if there was any time he wanted to give up on his dreams, Jide said there were lots of time he wanted to give up but the enormous support he got from his wife encouraged him to ride on.
When asked what he has done differently to ensure sustainability of the business, Jide stated that he has done a lot of research on the country’s shoe sector and understood why the likes of Bata Shoes, who was producing 10.4 million shoes per annum in the 1990’s failed.
Currently, Keexs signed up for a World Bank grant to raise funds to set up the manufacturing arm of the business. Jide is an award-winning entrepreneur. In 2016, he won the Tony Elumelu Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Abioye and Ladi
For Abioye Tunde-Anjous and Ladi Oshinaike, co-founders of SirChefs Food and Beverage, their food inspiration came directly from the personal stories of the employees they found around them.
SirChefs Food and Beverage is a real celebration of Nigeria’s food industry, with its essence created from local and traditional ingredients that are unique.
Through its Breakfast King brand, Abioye and Ladi provide Nigeria’s Pap (popularly called Ogi or akamu) and Akara (bean cake) in cups. The pack enables employees and people with busy schedules to take breakfast quickly and regularly.
“The idea behind our business came when we were both working with the health insurance industry. As a pharmacist, one of my roles in my former organisation was to talk to employees about their health and each time I asked if they had taken breakfast, I got a ‘no’ response from most of them,” Abioye said.
“Living a fast-paced lifestyle is often why workers often skip their breakfast. Knowing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and how it can make workers productive, I decided to fill the gap by providing them the right meal for breakfast,” Abioye stated.
After doing some research on what the ideal breakfast could be, Abioye shared his idea with Ladi, his friend and colleague then, who bought into it and in 2017 they established SirChef Food and Beverage.
“We identified that even if there were options available for breakfast, they were not very healthy, and the ones that were healthy, you find them very expensive. So we felt we could make the food available and affordable,” Ladi disclosed.
Abioye and Ladi started their business with the money they raised from their personal savings while they were working and also sourced additional capital from family and friends.
SirChef Food and Beverage currently has 26 full-time and part-time employees.
ODINAKA ANUDU and JOSEPHINE OKOJIE
