Imagine this: you’re a second-year uni student with a rather expensive pastime: buying clothes. You hit the market to hunt for a new haul when your allowance landed. In your head, it was almost a sin to repeat clothes.
I was this person in 2014.
Forget food; if you were trying to impress me, you’d better buy me clothes. My allowance drove this habit, and while I no longer remember how much I got from home, I know the money barely touched my pocket before landing in the market. The great thing about this was that I was popular for my style on campus.
My dad was laid off from work the same year, and everything immediately became tough. My allowance was the first to go. Events like this flip something in your brain, so I started thinking, “What do I do now?”
The answer came in waves: “You love clothes; make it a business.”
I pitched this to my dad and an uncle, and they raised ₦60k for me, no questions asked. Like that, I was in business. For the next two years, I focused on the market on my campus before moving to Lagos to push this business to all the lengths I could.
In 2024, Haute Collections sold ₦500m worth of clothes in a year. It’s true, it happened, and here’s how I did it.
Social media and content creation moved the needle
In 2017, my Instagram account had about 2,000 followers. So, I turned my sights there, hoping to improve my reach and expand my customer base. First, I researched and studied as many African-American-owned fashion businesses as possible. Fashion Nova was an easy favourite.
At the end of this process, I learned a fascinating insight that hasn’t left me, and was a critical part of my process in 2024. Marketing products effectively on social media went beyond just posting pictures. There was an element of content creation in it.
The brands I studied were keen on utility-driven content. Every post taught their audience how to wear or style the clothes, showing them exactly how they’d look when they wore the outfit.
This was interesting, so I got to work. I got my first major success with this in 2020, but it didn’t even start off this way.
On January 3rd, 2020, I lost my Instagram account and its 58,000 followers. Not to be dramatic, but I built that account with money, blood, sweat, and tears. And I lost it because a post was flagged for copyright reasons.
When this happened, I took a two-month break. Subsequently, I converted my page into my business page and returned to the ring.
If the same thing happens again, it probably won’t hurt as much and I won’t need to take a break. My customer data doesn’t sit entirely on social media, but I’ll get to this soon.
Back to 2020
Then I got the second curveball — COVID-19 happened, and everyone was on lockdown. I was very nervous about this, and I remember asking a friend, “Why would anyone buy clothes when there’s nowhere to wear them?”
I didn’t know it then, but I’d get an answer.
It’s ironic, but the pandemic drove sales. Content creation became incredibly popular as people optimised to find some excitement wherever possible.
As everyone looked for ways to stay connected with their friends during the pandemic, many people turned to creating content. 2020 had many social media challenges, and people needed to look good. This process involved shopping for new clothes, playing dress-up, and shooting pieces of content. It also drove the sales of fashion products, and I could never have seen it coming.
Naturally, I took content creation more seriously as I saw how quickly it made people and trends viral. Sure, I sold clothing products. But I also understood that more people were plugged into their phones in a way they weren’t in previous years. I hoped reaching them could drive conversions.
Subsequently, I went viral a few times, and my accounts grew astronomically, hitting 100k followers in 2020. Sales volume grew, too.
I couldn’t tell you how many units of clothes I was moving daily, but I knew I had hit new growth levels as my daily volume grew from an average of ₦100k-₦200k/week to about ₦2m/week.
I’ve developed a taste and an eye for content that works, which was also a key part of my customer acquisition process in 2024. Now, in many ways, I know the type of content the audience will receive well—or even push to go viral — before it goes out. It’s a skill — a muscle — that the business continues to leverage. It drives a lot of our customer acquisition process.
I didn’t go a day without posting on the business’s Instagram page. I’ve found that liking or replying to a potential customer’s comment under a post can decide whether they take action and make an order.
Optimising the business’s structure and process. Thankfully, I had help
Before 2020, I was too busy figuring out survival to care about structure. And while the business grew in 2021 and 2022, I still didn’t think much about properly structuring my business operations.
A random conversation kicked off this process. An acquaintance asked if I had a product website, and I suddenly realised we processed every order on social media.
By the end of the conversation, I also realised I had no idea how much the business made in a month or a year. Or even the full scale of my inventory. All I knew was that the business was making money.
This gap needed to be plugged, and they offered me a solution.
A few days later, the people from Bumpa set me up on their inventory management system, and I also got a website. This move transformed my operations, especially last year.
The business had grown so much that I could now hire staff. But this came with its hurdles: I had to monitor what they were doing. So I had to be at the store at all times. Also, we didn’t have an inventory system. If customers reached out after work hours, we couldn’t confirm product availability until the following day, slowing the turnaround time.
Bumpa solved all of these problems. You may have seen that video that went viral last year; I got all that information from my Bumpa app.
Last year, I took the business’s sales performance more seriously than ever. For example, if the store makes ₦2m in one day and ₦600k in another, something broke with our content creation process.
One more thing: customer payment. A few times, people shopped with their cards on the website and then reported the transaction to their banks so they could flag the money. It’s potentially stressful, but Bumpa has always swooped in with a solution.
The biggest habit I’ve built with Bumpa is documenting my daily sales and customers’ details. I can boast of 100% bookkeeping at Haute Collections as a business, which pushes me to do more. It’s how I know we made ₦500m in 2024.
Building relationships with suppliers
Curiosity drives business growth. In this context, I was curious about sourcing. In 2015, I was very keen on finding suppliers outside of Nigeria. The Lagos market worked, but opening up new supply lines would be useful. So, I looked for Chinese and American wholesale businesses. This had its learning curve, and I lost money, but I learned from my mistakes.
However, I didn’t rely on these websites alone.
Moving to Lagos meant I could explore the Lagos Island market in a way I couldn’t when I lived in Delta State. Ten years later, not much has changed here.
Although I source outside the country, many of my suppliers have businesses in the Lagos Island market. It’s a gap no one else can fill. I found that these kinds of relationships are important. When his warehouse has new stock, I get the first pick. You have no idea how useful and ahead of the competition this makes me.
I knew I could never run out of good stock with this model, and I haven’t. It’s simple: good stock drives sales. It certainly did in 2024.
One more thing: customer retention
Also, customer retention is key. There’s no one way to do this, but I’ve built a relationship with my customer base so that they know they get great deals with me. Business is often give-and-take, so I’m very open to offering customers discounts. It’s a win-win situation when this happens—the customers are happy they got a good deal, and I know almost for sure that they’ll return for more.
Bumpa does a lot for me along these lines: I depend on their tracking system for insight on customers my staff need to follow up on. For example, customers often abandon their cart without completing their order. Since I know the exact point these customers drop off, I put my staff on sending their reminder text messages or calls.
It works most of the time.
Bottom line
It took ten years and a lot of trial and error, but my business’s revenue crossed ₦500 million in 2024 because I showed up consistently, created content that converts, leveraged technology and data, built strong supplier relationships and structured my business like a real company.
