Introduction
African Yuva was founded by Beverly Mawia, 25, in 2018 with the vision to produce high-quality, affordable and stylish African-print fashion for special occasions in a timely manner and is worn worldwide including by celebrities such as Lupita Nyong’o.
The story of African Yuva begins in the year 2018
How it started
Beverly started African Yuva with a clear vision in mind: to create high-quality affordable, comfortable, well-fitted, and fashionable clothing for women and to change the narrative of fundis delivering bad quality work late.
Watch the video below where Beverly shares more insights on how the company started and what:
The factors driving African Yuva's growth
In only three years, African Yuva grew from an idea to a small and thriving business with five full-time employees, a workshop, and shop prescence in two markets. In the following, we describe and analyze the various factors that led to African Yuva’s growth. We identified two main factors: entrepreneurial traits and business model.
The Entrepreneurial Traits
At the age of 25, Beverly Mawia has grown African Yuva to an international fashion brand. We identified three main entrepreneurial traits that contributed to her building and growing African Yuva.
- Passion for fashion: Her passion and keen eye for fashion laid the foundation for creating African Yuva. Immediately after high school, she started making and selling floor mats and later on in university, she picked up beaded jewelry and crocheting to earn an extra income next to school. She never trained as a fashion designer and taught herself the necessary skills to make floor mats, jewelry and now clothing driven by the interest in merging her creativity and passion for fashion with business. This persistence and passion drives her to build an African fashion label up to today.
- Eye for details: Beverly spotted a gap in the market for producing high-quality African print fashion. In Nairobi, you can find a tailor or fundi at every other corner to tailor-make attires or dresses for you; however, often tailors deliver bad quality work, are not reachable on phone and don’t meet deadlines. Beverly’s eye for detail and high quality standards lead to her and the team producing consistent high-quality fashion on time. Up to today, she personally quality controls every fashion item before it is shipped to the client to ensure consistency across African Yuva’s products.
- Robust work ethic: Beverly started her two early ventures next to university to combine her passion for fashion with generating an extra income as a student. She also started African Yuva as a side project next to her full-time job as an Accountant. In the early days, she’d often start her working days early or worked late into the evening and on the weekends to fulfil the orders for her clients in time. This hard work ethic allowed her to build African Yuva from an idea to a proven business model and 15 orders per week by April 2019 which allowed her to quit her job and work on African Yuva full-time.
Business Model
African Yuva doubled down on developing high-quality, unique attire from the very beginning, and paired their innovative products with leveraging word-of-mouth and building a strong social media presence. Later, they partnered with aggregator platforms to bring African Yuva to the next level.
- Product development: The initial growth of African Yuva was solely based on Beverly’s ability to detect a market gap for fashionable African-print dresses and attire for special occasions. Early on, she focused on building unique relationships with clients to develop attire that was 100% tailored to them. This included several fittings with clients, exchanges about sketches and inspirations via WhatsApp and co-creating the pieces to ensure that the created dress or attire would meet the client’s expectations. While this process was very time-intense and costly, it built necessary trust and brand reputation with her early customers. This led to her customers referring African Yuva to their friends and family which created the foundation for African Yuva’s customer base and continuous growth. Having the stable demand for tailor-made dresses as a foundation for the business, Beverly expanded the product line by creating her own fashion collections and producing different varieties of outfits such as jumpsuits and kimonos. African Yuva launched their first own collection in January 2019 and have since launched a new collection every six months with a total of 6 collections so far. This product expansion allowed her to expand her target market - adding ready-made fashion to her foundation of tailor-made fashion. It also allowed her to pursue different distribution channels as will be showcased further below.
- Customers: Before starting out, Beverly noticed that her family members and friends struggled to find African print dresses and attire that they can wear at special occasions. Often, the tailors they were working with delivered bad quality outcomes, were often difficult to reach and missed important deadlines which led to many of her friends and relatives growing increasingly frustrated. Keen on relieving this pain, Beverly set out to build an image in the clothing market by providing quality garments and workmanship. This led her to start African Yuva as a customer-centric company creating fashion to fulfill the need for high-quality, affordable, fashionable African print attire that is delivered on time. As described above, Beverly involved her customers in the fashion design process from start to the beginning. This customer-centricity resulted in very satisfied customers that then referred African Yuva to their networks of friends and family. After developing a stable customer base of tailor-made fashion customers by 2019, Beverly realized that her growth would be limited if she only focused on friends and family as customers because there is only so much fashion each of them can buy. Creating her own fashion collection allowed her to target a wider customer base for ready-made fashion. In creating her own fashion collection, Beverly took inspiration from the collaboration with her customers and from what outfits attracted most reactions on social media.
- Product model: Beverly started out by contracting different tailors to who she had gotten referred and she still maintains some of these relationships up to today. However, finding reliable tailors that produce consistently high-quality work was a major challenge for Beverly in the early days. By the end of 2019, 18 months after starting out, African Yuva had burned through 5 different tailors and quality assurance, as well as timely delivery, became increasingly difficult. To overcome this challenge, Beverly experimented with an innovative model: she rented out a workshop and sub-let it to fundis that could use the workshop to work on her apparel as well as their other clients. She offered them to pay for part of the rent by prioritizing making fashion for African Yuva. With this model, the fundis had an incentive to prioritize their work for African Yuva while still being able to fulfill requests from their other clients. The production process of the apparel became more streamlined and it was easier to meet timelines. Now, African Yuva has their own workshop with five full-time employees that are paid by African Yuva and only work on making garments for African Yuva. Quality assurance still is a big challenge for African Yuva and Beverly is now training one of her employees to support her in quality assurance. However, because quality assurance is so important to maintain African Yuva’s brand reputation and their client’s trust, Beverly still quality controls each piece of garment herself before it is shipped to the customer.
- Revenue model: Financing any new business is a major challenge. Beverly started by financing the early operations through deposits for each order received through mobile money payments. This was possible because she started out serving her friends and family, people who already trusted her and felt comfortable in paying deposits for each fashion item upfront. She invested all the income back into the business, and did not pay herself a salary until the beginning of 2020. This was possible because Beverly had a full-time job next to starting African Yuva that enabled her to sustain her living expenses and still save up some emergency funds for when she decided to become a full-time entrepreneur. By the time she quit her job in 2019, she had enough savings to sustain herself for another six months or so without a salary. Developing a pricing model was initially quite challenging as it was difficult to set prices across different regions with different consumer economic realities. After some experimenting, African Yuva now follows a cost-based pricing approach which means the prices are based on the cost of creating the item including labor cost, material and delivery cost plus a markup. Because she is serving both local and international markets, her price range is from KES 3,500 (USD 35) to KES 20,000 (USD 200).
- Marketing & Sales: In the beginning, there was no money to pay for marketing or sales. Therefore, Beverly leveraged referrals and word of mouth to organically grow her brand. Consistency and reliability are key drivers of trust and brand reputation and she focused on achieving high customer satisfaction which resulted in her clients referring her to their friends and family. Her happy clients also posted about African Yuva on Instagram. Social media marketing, especially on Instagram, is a cornerstone of African Yuva’s marketing strategy. In 2017, prior to incorporating African Yuva, Beverly created a Facebook page that she would occasionally update with photos of African print as well as Ankara outfits. Organically, the page grew to over 4000 followers through inviting Facebook friends to like the page and the momentum that followed. Her breakthrough came in 2020 March, when an agency reached out to her saying that they were looking for up-and-coming brands in Kenya that Lupita Nyong’o can promote on her social media. She sent Lupita one of African Yuva’s jumpsuits and Lupita promoted it on her Instagram. This led to an increase in followers, on Facebook by 10,000 people and on Instagram by 1000 people from both Kenya and the US, and was instrumental in expanding her market outside of Kenya as well. However, African Yuva did not have its own website and online shop yet which made them lose out on redirecting traffic to its website from the successful promotion.
Market Expansion
In 2019, African Yuva expanded to the US market by setting up an online shop with Etsy as well as selling and advertising its fashion on the platform Afrikae. The marketers at Afrikare are always looking to partner with African brands to simplify the process of accessing customers in foreign markets and positively responded to African Yuva’s outreach to sell their fashion through Afrikae’s platform. Given African Yuva’s growth, it was the next logical step.
In 2020, African Yuva was hit by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. As most small businesses, this led to a standstill of the demand for event outfits, as social gatherings were banned throughout the pandemic. In Kenya, African Yuva still sold some items from their 2020 collection, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the bills. Their initial customer base was too small to sustain the business throughout the pandemic. Therefore, African Yuva expanded its market base through aggregator platforms. In Kenya, African Yuva started supplying Vivo with clothes through their online platform Shop Zetu in April 2020. By September 2020, African Yuva processed an average of 40 orders in a week, mostly driven by orders through Shop Zetu. Internationally, African Yuva leveraged their existing presence on Etsy and the fashion platform Afrikae to sell their apparel in the United States, with an unserved demand for African print attire. This market growth in the United States was amplified by African Yuva’s collaboration with Lupita Nyong’o.
Learnings / Recommendations & Future Outlook
African Yuva has made strides to conquer the fashion market. Since its foundational days in 2018, African Yuva has grown into a small enterprise with five full-time employees and stable revenues and profits. Its customer base is continuously growing due to the smart usage of online channels and aggregator platforms such as Shop Zetu and Afrikrea. Looking at African Yuva’s ability to grow amidst a global pandemic makes it seem like the future market and business growth is secured.