My Startup Story: The MVP

Now one of our dearest friends and Apaart ambassador, manager to the amazing artist Dricky, who at the time ONLY painted on Birkin bags, was hanging out with him at my house one day and we saw an opportunity to add some spice to our intentionally simple and classic bag designs by hand painting designs by Dricky on them. The rest as they say is history.

After we got our required proof of concept - we sold over 50 bags in 4 months with no official marketing, depending solely on word of mouth and our own gift of the gab - we decided to invest in the equipment and set-up we needed to grow our business - sewing machines(we got so much support from Eric who owner of Perelei, a long time leather goods designer), skins, hardware, staff, our own workshop and in December 2017, our first store.

We built our brand using social media, and built our website for FREE using wix.com. Now, Social media is a very strange place, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around it but one thing is for certain, it is a POWERFUL TOOL. For one, it puts you and your product/service in the hands of a worldwide audience with the click of one button. Our very first sale outside of family and friends was through Instagram by a lovely boutique in Qatar. We were balled and baffled by the request and the rapidity of closing the sale. I kept wanting to ask her “ARE YOU SURE??” because I couldn't understand how a stranger from a faraway land wanted to buy something from us!

This story will not be complete without talking about strategic influencer marketing. The first person of influence to ever be seen carrying our bag was our Nollywood queen Genevieve Nnaji #bows. It didn’t matter that she didn’t tag us on the post because we didn’t necessarily need her followers following us, but we needed it for validation from our own target customers because - Genny is kind of a big deal!! After that, our Instagram superstars Nnenna & Leslie Okoye #Okoyewives and Ozinna Anumudu started posting pictures of themselves rocking their Apàárt. Recently our fave Aunty Mo posted a picture of herself carrying one of her Apàárt bags and the responses have been D.O.P.E. Now we've entered the moby dick of the bag making industry - Discerning women who LOVE their designer bags, appreciate the value of exotic skin and are ready to support the #buyNigerian movement.

I think the funniest thing is the fact that we set up a business with exporting in mind, and have achieved significant success and growth without that segment being our primary market (we do have clients in the Middle East, UK and America). I would say because we started with a global focus, it has shaped our thinking, design and production processes to always strive for excellence and to produce an export worthy product. We designed our model to be focused on the international market and didn’t foresee that there would be a market here for high-end exotic skin bags. We haven't had any downtime since we started and are now having to consider alternatives for production to enable us meet our target without isolating our primary market in Nigeria. The moment we realised this, we were quick to pivot and restructure our pricing from the dollazzzz to their Naira value keeping in mind that the average Nigerian shopper is price sensitive and WILL ask for a discount to which my answer will always be - SCHOOL FEES, MA/SIR.

This is just the beginning for us, its only been 9 months and 250 bags and although we don't know what lies ahead, we felt compelled to share the story of our business journey and our lessons learned so far. So here goes…Wait for it in part 3 :-)