Wandia Gichuru

I’m Wandia Gichuru, Managing Director of Vivo Activewear Limited, clothes made in Kenya, specifically tailored for the modern African woman, who has a busy lifestyle and wants to look and feel her best.

When I graduated from university, I went into employment. I was in employment for 20 years. My last position was a 10 year contract that I knew couldn’t be renewed, like it was non-renewable. When that was over and I was like in my early 40s at the time, I think for me it was an opportunity to do something completely different. Like I just, I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. In a way, it was God sent.

Because if the contract had been renewed, I probably would have stayed and kept getting a nice salary and kept doing the same thing. At that point, I knew I wanted something different but I didn’t know what exactly. I trained to be a life coach, got my accreditation, thought that could be something I would turn into a career, but then I really struggled to make it economically viable.

It was hard to charge people the amount I would have needed to charge to make a living. I guess in that process, because you get coached a lot as you’re learning to coach others, I asked myself a lot of questions. What sort of lifestyle do I want? Then what can I do that fits the lifestyle that I want, as opposed to what do I want to do and then figure out what your life looks like if you do that.

I knew I didn’t want to be employed; I knew I wanted my time to be very flexible. Business seemed like the obvious kind of choice but I expected it to be something like I have a business that kind of runs itself and I sometimes engage. I started doing various dance classes with a girlfriend of mine. She was also trying to figure out what to do next. In the mean time we were like this, let’s learn hip-hop, let’s learn how to salsa. I think it’s also midlife crisis.

My kids were doing ballet. In that process, we were looking for accessories, things. We wanted dance sneakers, I wanted ball shoes – couldn’t find anything. My friend is also a Pilates instructor. The more we looked at it we were like, okay there is definitely a gap in the market for this community that’s starting to get more interested in health and fitness and dance. Maybe we should do something to cater to them but at that point neither of us had ever done business in our lives.

So like okay, we’ll just create a brand and then we’ll sell all night. Well, we first Googled and went on          Alibaba.

We’d identified a few suppliers What I did first, is we ordered online so I hadn’t travelled. We got a lot of samples in. We started putting fliers up at schools and telling people that we have these products. They could order.

Everyone wanted to see them. They wanted to touch them, they wanted to try them on, they wanted to feel them.

We flew out to China to go and meet the suppliers. I started asking people to come to my house. You know, after a while you are like, this is my house I want my privacy. Then we were like, if we are going to take this seriously maybe the online thing – we are not quite ready for that. Maybe we need a shop space.

Literary we just happened to driving past Junction because I live nearby and I could see they were expanding. We walked into the management office and said, “We have a business selling dance sneakers and cool stuff, we’d like a space.” They were like, “Oh that’s going to be interesting, no one is doing that.” They offered us a tiny store and we were like okay, what would that involve, how much rent etc. The numbers were high.

We were like, okay are we really going to do this. I hadn’t expected that we would actually commit to a six year lease with a mall that expects rent every quarter and all of that. We just took the lead and we did it. Then, because we now were going to have to pay rent, we decided that instead of just focusing on dance and fitness, we should also do clothing.

That’s how we started, so that’s when we travelled and we bought a whole bunch of clothes from, mostly from Thailand and from China. Put them in the store and from the day we opened the shop, it was actually the clothes that people liked.

We still carry a small dance and fitness line but our primary product is our clothing line. When you want to apply for the space they ask you to submit your business plan and your projections. That forced us and literary I remember going home and just Googling like template for business plan, downloading it, changing numbers.

Projections, I just moved backwards I’m like okay, I’m going to be paying this much rent, this much salaries. This is what is going to cost us, so to break evenly we have to sell this amount. Let’s just expect to sell like 10% and that’s what I put down as our projections having no clue like what to expect. I did a lot of project management in my employment time so I had to work with budgets and spreadsheets and things like that so it helped. But I still have to ask my accountant now, what does that mean, help explain that to me.

I think it’s hard in a country like this because it’s not like you can go and easily get market data that tells you startups in retail clothing you can expect to sell this or this is the average. Till today, I still have no idea how we are doing vis-à-vis anybody else.

I think we are doing really well. I think we can always do better but I think we are growing, every year we are growing. Between 2014 and 2015, we grew 50%. You know we are still young, so of course the growth rate is higher in the business. We are still opening shops so that always helps as well. Even within store growth, same store growth, we are probably between 20 to 30%.

Then it goes like this. It depends on the day you ask or the month you ask we saw a dip towards the end of last year, which was quite worrying. This year it’s like slowly picking up again. I mean overall, I think we are doing pretty well.

I hired a lot of consultants who have worked with me like hands on learning. I haven’t signed up for anything formal but I’ve applied for a program this year which I’m really hoping I get onto. That would be the first formal type of training. I also do a lot of research online. There is just so much out there like case studies and examples. If you have a specific problem or situation and you look, you’ll get. Then I talk to people, I’m always asking for advice from other business people. I have friends who are specialists in like HR issues. If I need that particular advice I’ll ask.

We co-founded the business and she is the shareholder and director but she’s not involved in the day to day running. Because very soon after we started, she took over her family business which was humongous and very time consuming. Now she chairs our board. She’s involved, when I need her, she’s gorgeous. She’s like an ambassador.

I’d saved from my years in employment not expecting that I would need it all for the business. Because when we started, we thought we were going to be online and didn’t need much. The big investment first initially was because we took the store at Junction. Goodwill, fitting out a shop, buying stock, hiring people, getting the systems in place, was about $70,000.

I think goodwill, when you talk about that outside of Kenya, is when you are buying an ongoing concern. You are buying something that has existing clientele, has a brand etc. Here, it’s just for the good fortune of having been allowed to open a shop, malls do that.

I think it’s going to change because I think for the longest time, there was much less supply than demand. Now, with all these malls coming up, a lot of new malls don’t ask for goodwill People who wanted to open shops- there were not enough malls out there. You know, you had to pay a premium, it’s like joining a club. That’s your membership fee to join the club and it’s gone once you’ve paid it.

However, having said that, if you decide at some point during your lease that you want to sell on to somebody else, then you can get that goodwill back. You can even get more than what you paid. The best time to pay goodwill is in a brand new mall.

Like now, so I think at Junction five years or four years ago, we paid a million in goodwill. Then we had to fit out the space and it cost another two, three million. If we were to sell that space now, and someone’s buying it … If it’s still considered a premium mall, and there is limited space on ground floor, then we could ask for five, six million shillings. That will be goodwill.

They are not buying Vivo, but they are taking over the space that we fitted out. 90% of the time people will do that and then bring it down and refit the space. They are paying just to get in the space.

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My challenges as a woman are not specifically to do with the business. I think the challenge we have as women generally, is that, we want to be super women. We want to be best at our jobs, best mothers, best friends, best sisters. I mean, in that sense, I feel a woman entrepreneur, especially if she is a woman with a family, I don’t mean just kids. It could be parents that you are looking after or siblings. There is a responsibility women carry that not all men carry. I think that ends up making the job more pressured. I also think as a woman, maybe I’m biased because I really love women. I think even as employers, we are more concerned.

My biggest responsibility in this business is to make sure everyone is paid, they are paid on time because they have children, they have families they are taking care of. Touch wood, we have never delayed paying our salaries.

That kind of thing. I think there is a care of duty that women take with us wherever we go. We bring that to business as well. When I listen to some people talk about the challenges of being a woman, I see the reality for them.

For me I’m like, I sit here designing, we make clothes and put them in a shop and we have women staff and women clients and we work in a very female world.

I forgive myself, because I will never be everything. remind myself all the time that I’m human and we’ll all mess up. I try not to take it all too seriously. Then because I’m a single mom, I live with my kids on my own, their father doesn’t live in the country. I look for a lot of help. I have amazing people working at home, I live next door to one of my best friends, she helps out. I have friends who I can rely on. Even though I don’t necessarily call on them that often, but just knowing they are there.

Knowing they’ve got my back. If tomorrow I call them and say, “Guys, I need to go away for two weeks, can you have my children,” they will take them. My children have been raised to expect a community to love them and support them. I’ve never sort of tried to keep them as mine. I’m like, “You want to hold my baby?” Have her for a weekend.

I think I want to see my kids being independent and comfortable. Not with everybody, I mean they need to be able to discern when to trust people or not. If they are people I’ve introduced them to who I trust, I want them to be comfortable. In fact, it goes to the opposite extreme where sometimes I’ll be away for a week and I call them I’m missing them and they are not so interested. They are so happy wherever they are. They are like, “Sorry mom, got to go, don’t have time to talk to you.”

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I guess in a sort of job description sense, I’m what they will call the creative director. I’m not a fashion designer. I understand the basics now, because I’ve got someone come in and train me. Because I wanted to know like, really how do you grade what you draft.

I do all the buying so even when we buy, because we still import about 50% of the products that we sell in the store. I choose everything. There is nothing that’s ever been seen in Vivo that wasn’t chosen by me. It’s something that I actually want to start moving away from because I want to see the business not need me. I want to know that this business will grow and run.

In a way, doing the creative direction wasn’t that different from buying. Because when you are buying you are seeing stuff you like and you are saying, oh I think that would work, I think these colors would work. I think these sizes would work, these volumes …

Sometimes, I use samples that I’ve bought or that I own to inspire something. I might be, I like the concept of this, I like the way they’ve used block, colors but I think we should do it but make it into a maxi version, cut off the sleeves.

We would fall someone under the category of fast fashion. Our prices aren’t designer prices. We are not doing runways and catwalks. We are just trying to offer fun, affordable clothing to aspiring and middle class Kenyans. I think most of the businesses around the world that do that, are not coming up with brand new ideas. They are just looking at what’s trending, what’s out there. Then what we really try to do, is to then take those ideas and make them work for the African woman. In terms of our lifestyles, modesty issues, or conservatism. Also in terms of our body shapes, our skin tones. For example, a lot of designs in Asia don’t even require a bra and they can get away with that. So I think what we are trying to say is, let’s cater to our uniqueness. Even in terms of like colour choices, because, you can go into a store and it’s all neutrals. It’s all like grey, black, white. The reason they don’t do color, is that color doesn’t look good on fair skin, but it looks great on African skin. Let’s play; as you get older you’ll realize that, your face isn’t quite bright and shiny, youthful, so you need a bit of color to like make you stand out and feel good about yourself.

We then realized, Nairobi is big, traffic and stuff like that, a lot of people won’t drive across town. As much as the Junction was a really great location, we were losing out on a lot of the people who live across the other side. Then we quite quickly, within six months, opened a second store at New Muthaiga, which is a much slower mall. We opened Junction, people bought. Now we open New Muthaiga it’s like huh, nobody is coming. I think with a lot of businesses, you can plan and you can plan and then there are some things that are just lucky- right place, right time. When we walked into Junction and it was like, can we have a store? They were like yeah. Later on I find out people were like, but I’ve been waiting for two years and they never gave me a space. I was like, how come we got a space. That day, that guy we met liked the idea, he was in a good mood, do you see …

We opened New Muthaiga, you will sit for two days, three days no sale, I’m like, you mean it wasn’t just our product. Of course it forces you to now work harder and it’s like, man okay we have to market, we have to tell people. Stuff we weren’t taking that seriously at Junction.

We started expanding and now working harder. I think by the time two years into the business, we had three or four stores; people, were able to better access our products. We weren’t offering a wide enough range of sizes and of colors because I was limited to what I’d find on the market. I tried bringing products from the UK and from South Africa as well but the price points didn’t work for us.

Then we kind of thing with business, you learn that, if you go in at a certain price point, it’s very hard to start a new change. Because you can go down, you can always go downWe kind of became known at a certain price point. Then my challenge was how do I get bigger sizes into the store and it was as simple as that.

I started trying to look at could I order directly from factories over there to make to our specification, but the minimum order quantities are huge. I was like okay, well maybe I can find something closer to home, Mauritius. When I would travel, I would look at where things are made. I’d always look at the labels and see things that look like Vivo-ish. Then, made in Mauritius, made here, made there.

Anyway, so then what happened was, because I was doing all the buying, I was travelling quite often to Asia. One of my friends was like I’ve never been, next time you are going I’m coming with you and she is a designer. I don’t know if you know. Anyway, so she makes, that’s her thing. She designs, she made, she studied fashion, she’s the real thing.

We travelled together for three weeks. During that time, I knew at some point we are going to figure out how to get bigger sizes into the store but on this trip I was buying as usual. She was looking at fabrics and she was like, “Wandia, come with me to the fabric things.” I’m like, “Then, what am I going to do?” She was like, “No, you make the stuff at home.”

She really convinced me and I was like, “I know nothing.” “It’s not that complicated. You’ll get tailors, you’ll buy machines. You’ll figure it out.”

You mean if I take this fabric I can make whatever I want, do you know what I mean. I cannot limit it because I would walk around shops and I have an idea but I’m not finding what I’m looking for.

I started buying rows of fabric. I actually ended up buying more than that. At this point I have nothing, I have no clue. I’m like, well we’ll ship it home together, takes six weeks. I’ll have figured something out.

I come home and I start looking. I start looking for machines, I start looking for tailors, found a flat but we were kicked out after three months because they are like, who are these people. This is residential. Anyway, so we with two tailors, three machines. Literary I would take all dresses, cut them open, lay it on the fabric, cut around and tell them stitch it. They would stitch it.

I put it on. I remember the first dress I made, put it on and I went to a function. Everyone was like, “Oh my god your dress is so amazing.” You know, the whole concept, I don’t know if you guys have watched clothes being made. I still find it so funny. Because when you see fabric, it looks so two dimensional or others one dimensional. Then you you cut it, they are just these funny pieces. Then they saw it together and suddenly you have a dress. The process from this thing that’s flat on a table to becoming this thing that you wear and makes you look good, to me it’s just like magic. In fact I love cutting. You know how some people say they like ironing; I’ve never understood, but cutting. I can sit there and then slowly just cut a pattern and I forget what I’m doing. I forget where I am.

***

I’m very, very passionate about people feeling good about themselves, that’s what I’m passionate about.

I love people sort of claiming their power, taking charge of their lives, stepping outside their comfort zone and doing something they’ve never done before. Beating the odds, facing the odds, even failing but still getting up.

I think for me, there are many elements to a business that have that in them. Whether it’s employing people and by virtue of the fact that they are now employed and they now have a job and a salary, they are able to do something they never could do. I am so excited about creating jobs because it changes people’s lives. Not just what they eat and what they put on the table, but how they feel. There is a dignity that comes with earning and taking care of your families and being able to invest.

With our product, you wear the dress, you feel good about yourself whether you are too small or too big. We all see the world kind of through our own lenses. When I had very young kids, a lot of what I thought and talked about was babies and what babies needed and stuff like that. Now, my kids are a bit older and I’m watching myself and my friends go through that transition of you are in your 40s and you are getting towards 50. It’s easy to let go of taking care of yourself and giving up and not feeling that attractive anymore or stuff like that.

I have a few friends who are in that stage and came to Vivo, some of them will come here and will spend two hours just trying on different things. I’d be like, “Try this.” They are like, “There is no way.” I’m like, “Just put it on.” They put it on, they look at themselves in the mirror and they are just like, “Oh my God, you mean I can look like that?” Clothes can do that. There is a part of me that thinks none of these things should be that important, do you know what I mean. Like really, truly our power has to come from inside us. At the same time, the reality is that how you feel can be shaped by how you look and how much effort you put into.

I like to get up and put on make-up not because I’m going to meet anybody, but just because it makes me feel good. I think you have to have a healthy approach to it because if you become too obsessed, then you’ll lose some of the joy. I have to tell myself not to be so obsessed about things like fat around my belly and stuff like that.

For me, I want to feel strong. In fact that was my word of this year; I want my business to be strong and my relationships to be strong. I want my body to be strong.

I mean you take yourself everywhere you go. For me this is the year that I’m getting into shape, physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever. I’m doing yoga. It’s also more about solidifying Vivo’s foundation so that when we grow, we have a solid, solid base. I mean we are still going to open a couple of more stores. The Nairobi one is most likely going to be Village Market. Then outside of Nairobi we are looking at either Eldoret or Nanyuki. Nanyuki wouldn’t have been my first option but there is a mall coming up now. You also have to kind of work with what’s available. We get more online orders from Kisumu than any other city outside of Nairobi.

I think the opportunities are huge for manufacturing. I think as a country, it’s been focused on the export market. The capacity that exists has been tailored for that market. We are a growing country. We are 40 plus million people and the middle class is growing and so people are going to have more disposable income. I think as they do that, they are going to move away from mitumba [second-hand clothing] or not.

Because I think right now, a lot of people only ever wear mitumba. I think I know there are people who are born and die and never wear anything new in their lives. The whole mitumba argument is tricky because it has killed a lot of local textiles and stuff like that. On the other hand, I think it’s given people amazing choice. People can now dress in the style they like. When I was growing up, there were very few options. We just had to go for jeans.

Now you can express yourself. Because I also think fashion is just a way to express your personality and you need to have options of what to buy.

Why can’t we make it here? It’s the same machines, we are all humans with hands and brains and whatever. If they can make them in Ethiopia and Mauritius and they can make them in China, why can’t we make them here? Mauritius’ economy grew almost predominantly because of their textile industry, because they made a conscious decision to take this seriously. Something like 30% of their GDP comes from the textile sector.

We have so many unemployed people. If you could hire unskilled people who have dropped out of school or finished high school and have no other qualification, and can train them to do a job in a factory. Where they are paid probably what you pay your lady who cooks at your house, you know what I mean? It’s an okay living and that gives them a skill.

What I’m also saying is there is more and more excitement about the Made in Kenya proposition. I think people are becoming more conscious, more proud. They have more faith in local products, so I think that’s changing as well. You are seeing the whole fashion industry also coming up with more and more designers, more and more people who are taking careers in that industry seriously, whether it’s bloggers, stylists.

I mean I didn’t know you could make money being a stylist or being a blogger. There are bloggers who are earning more than CEOs of companies.

I think a lot of my challenges, is that I was swimming in the dark. I bought machines not really knowing what they could do and why. Then I hired people not really knowing they were the best for the job. So we’ve taken a very back route that was full of potholes and messy. Perhaps now in hindsight, if we had understood it better, it would have been a much more streamlined approach, that would have required more money. Because we probably have invested slightly differently.

I think, if you are not experienced in the industry, get the right guidance early on and spend a little bit more time figuring it out, rather than just diving into the deep. Then realizing that was a mistake. Really, the setup we have here is not viable and that’s what I’ve come to learn almost three years into it.

We hired the wrong profile of staff; we don’t have the right quality control systems. We are very inefficient. A similar size factory in Bangkok will produce double what we can produce. Because they hire unskilled laborers and then they train them on a specific operation.

If they are doing zips, that’s all they do and they do the best zips in the world and they do them quickly. I hired tailors. It’s like hiring a chef and then telling him stand there and just chop vegetables the whole day. A) You’ll be frustrated because it’s boring. B) It’s just a different profile and so we are paying more than what a typical factory worker would earn and we are not getting the efficiencies that you would get. Having said that, it’s still working out financially to be above the same as importing. It’s not like it’s costing us a lot because now we are saving on the shipping or the duties or the time away.

I think as we grow, we are going to have to make some decisions on whether to change the format. I think one option that we would look at is outsourcing the production. I’m 100% committed to the Made in Kenya proposition, but it doesn’t have to be made in Vivo. Companies like Zara will have 500 designers constantly doing samples, patterns whatever. Once they’ve got something right, they source it out, because that’s a whole other business.

I didn’t even know that some companies are actually doing that in Kenya right now. They are just stitching for other designers. We could then focus on the main part of our business which is retail.

What I’s tell women who are apprehensive about going into business is to break down what their worries are. Because some of your worries might be very legitimate and some of them might be ghosts that you’ve created in your mind. For the legitimate ones, I think, if let’s say you are like the sole bread winner and you have people who depend on you. Leaving a job that pays well to start up a full time business where you are not guaranteed an income, I think that’s a very legitimate worry.

In that sort of situation, I would be like, why don’t you try starting smaller and doing it on the side, finding a partner if you need to. Test your product or service you are offering. When it starts to pick up enough, then the risk of leaving a job to doing that is much less.

If your worry is, ‘I don’t quite have the concept perfect yet, I need to keep refining’ – I think a lot of people over plan. To the point where it becomes so scary, because you think what if I spent three years talking about this. What if I put it out there and no one buys. I think, with those sorts of worries you have to make a decision at some point. Are you committed to the idea or are you actually committed to implementing it. Because sometimes there are people who love to dream.

They spend their entire lives talking about that thing that one day they are going to do. Somehow that thing keeps the mundane line manageable because they can dream. If that’s what it’s doing for you and serving you that’s fine. If what you really want to do is start something, then you actually have to start. I don’t know what else to say, you just have to start and you start small.

I feel what has helped us a lot, is the fact that we took our product to the market immediately. We didn’t keep it to friends and family. If you want this thing to become a business, offer it to the market because you’ll get the feedback immediately.

The feedback is always a good thing, even when it’s negative feedback. The product might not be right, the pricing might not be right. The service might not be right. Then you can tweak. That’s the other thing I’d say, don’t be too precious about your idea, if you want to take it to the market. Let’s say you are an interior decorator and what you want to do is offer service where you are designing for people, you’ve got to work with them and what they like. If they keep rejecting your ideas, change your ideas. You can’t just keep pushing the same stuff and saying, but it’s nice, I like it. I’m a firm believer in like constantly checking in to see what are people thinking, what are people saying, what do they like, what don’t they like. What can we do differently?

I don’t buy anything I don’t like but I sometimes have to force myself to buy things that I wouldn’t wear. I have to tell myself, if you had the body of Halle Berry and you were 30, would you wear this? Actually I would. If I had an hourglass figure like that would I wear it or if I were big busted would I wear it. You’ve got to imagine yourself in different scenarios, different ages, different settings. But if I think something is hideous, I would never put it in the shop.

As a small business, digital marketing was probably the only viable option. We couldn’t afford TV, radio, print, billboards. We still can’t. I think it was easy and it was free initially and it was the option that was in front of us.

In the beginning, probably for the first three and a half years, I just did it myself. Literally from my smartphone in bed and it wasn’t consistent. It wasn’t regular. I posted what I felt like posting, when I felt like posting it, half of it had nothing to do with our brand. I’m really into motivational quotes and women who inspire me. If I see something, I mean Michelle Obama wearing something or saying something I like, I’m like I want to post that.

It was more a reflection of me than of the brand and obviously, there is a connection between me and the brand as well. About a year and a half ago, we hired a marketing person for the first time. Now, it’s more structured, it’s more consistent, she’s younger so she’ll put things that I don’t even understand. We do our man crush Mondays I’m like who are these guys. Actually, I don’t get involved anymore, I just run with it.

My mother is an English teacher so I grew up being corrected with my English all the time. Sometimes I cringe because of grammatical mistakes. Other than that I try not to get too involved. What we’ve had to do, definitely on Facebook so far is start paying for our post to be boosted, in order to make sure that they get seen.

Because the way Facebook works if you are a business, your page doesn’t go into anyone’s newsfeed. Who will go looking for you, you know what I mean? It has to come up and you are competing against everybody else that’s out there. We might have 20-30,000 people seeing it. They won’t all necessarily like it or interact with it but it will show on their newsfeed.

We haven’t paid for anything on Instagram but that’s now an option as well so we’ll see how that works. We also send branded SMSs to people who signed up. We have a loyalty program too. People who signed up for that go onto our database or if you sign in our guest book, you go into our database. Then you’ll also get a monthly newsletter, that our team puts together.

So what we’ve also done, is we’ve worked with influencers and we have an occasional brand ambassador. We also work with bloggers and other celebrities when they are willing to work with us and we feel as a fit. I think what that does because if you are scrolling through your newsfeed and there is hundreds of posts, but you see a famous face, you stop and look.

Then, they’ll realize it’s someone wearing a Vivo dress. Then what we have is sometimes people will come into the stores and say, I want the dress Grace was wearing, or I want the dress Sharon was wearing. We also get people ordering online because we do deliveries.

It definitely is translating to sales but how much I don’t know. I’m not too worried because I think, one of the key reasons, we want to drive sales, but we also want to build the brand, so just creating brand awareness.

It doesn’t mean that that person buys now, they’ve heard of Vivo and one day they will come. Maybe one day we’ll do a billboard.

Currently I have 40 employees but I want to have 400 in the next 10 years; with manufacturing, I can see that. We are also thinking of having an expert digital marketer to guide us.

I think those are all the things that in the next couple of years we’ll be exploring. There are so many opportunities that we don’t know how to take advantage of. In theory, we should be able to open a shop in Uganda and send our staff there and there should be no duties.  In fact Rwanda you can open in a day and start trading the next day.  I definitely want to go outside of Kenya.