BusinessDay 07 Jan 2019

Monday 07 January 2019
Start-Up Digest
In
association with
BUSINESS DAY
33
Top 5 business ideas featured in 2018
ODINAKA ANUDU and JOSEPHINE OKOJIE
Start-Up-Digest has ranked
entrepreneurs’ interview
in 2018 on our weekly
section and here are some
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.”
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
Hoawa Bello Abioye Tunde-Anjous Blondie Okpuzor
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 clearcut
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 writeup
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.
Start-Up Digest Team
Odinaka Anudu
Editor
odinaka.anudu@businessdayonline.com
08067478413
Reporters
Josephine Okojie
Bummi Bailey
Gbemi Faminu
Joel Samson
Graphics