Daphne Kasambala is the founder/CEO of Meekono, a B2B wholesale e-commerce platform streamlining virtual sourcing of premium uniquely African products for international commercial buyers.
Creating an enabling ecosystem for businesses in the creative sector by forging route-to-market opportunities and equipping them with the tools for achieving creative and business excellence.
Daphne Kasambala shared with Today Africa the story of Meekono, how it began, and where they are now.
Tell us a bit about yourself
I am Daphne Kasambala and I am a global citizen. I originate from Malawi, the warm heart of Africa, which is a small country in Southeast Africa. And I have lived most of my life outside Malawi, in the US and the UK, in South Africa. And at the moment, what I’m into is Africa’s creative and handicraft sector.
I believe that this is one of our true treasures that very few people can imitate. And I believe that we have a big opportunity to support this industry, this sector and enable the millions of youth, women, men who work in the sector to monetize those skills and those talents that they’ve inherited and also preserve Africa’s culture.
What inspired you to leave your banking job and venture into entrepreneurship to create a platform for creatives here in Africa?
I am one of those African children who had the typical parents who said you must do a sensible degree and follow a profession in banking, teaching accounting, etc. But in our family growing up, my mother who was a teacher taught us all how to do garment technology, needle craft, sewing, and tailoring.
So by the time I was 16, I was actually making collections for my friends and making money out of it. But when it came time to go to university, I then followed my parents advice to do a degree in a normal field. But that whole passion in the creative world never went away.
However, my first job out of university was in banking, and my career followed that path until several years later when I was in the banking industry in London. I had at this point gone into specialized finance, working with a lot of retail brands that I knew that you might recognize as global retail brands and European retail brands.
And I started getting that itch to say, can I not do something for Africa? Eventually I realized that I could because now I had an understanding of what retail looks like from a commercial point of view, from a professional point of view, and from a corporate point of view.
I had that knowledge as well as the passion for seeing African designs more prominently in global settings. And at the time, a lot of European brands were using African print and African inspiration without giving any of it the credit it was due. So you had big luxury brands using Masai and Zulu and Zutu and other inspirations, using Ankara prints and not giving any credit to Africa.
So that kind of irritated me a bit. I decided I would set up a retail brand that would give a platform to African designers and allow them to sell their products to women around the world who were looking for that kind of inspiration. So my first business wasn’t actually Meekono. It was a business called Sapelle and we ran for seven years.
And it was a huge learning curve for me to understand the challenges that African creatives face when it comes to growing their market share and accessing global markets. Also the process that they go through, the whole value addition process that they have to go through. And the challenges that are uniquely African that they face when it comes to trying to grow their business.
So it was really the passion around that that convinced me to let go of the stable paycheck and the corporate career into this very unstable and exciting. But still something that makes me get up in the morning every day many years later. It’s now been 12 years since I left my corporate banking career.
And I’ve been in this space and I’m still learning, I’m still growing, I’m still getting to understand. But I feel like I’m now beginning to add value, especially with the business Meekono, which I started in the middle of COVID. It’s what drives me every day.
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Can you describe the process of launching Meekono?
So the first business was a pure play retail business to customer retailing. I was buying wholesale, and I was retailing to customers around the world. I was sourcing from over a hundred different brands in about fifteen different African countries. And it didn’t matter whether I was sourcing from Nigeria, from Mali, Uganda, Nairobi, and South Africa.
I kept seeing the same problems repeated. I kept seeing issues of quality control, product market fit, no consistency on pricing, shipping, transportation, and logistical issues. After seven years, I realized that I’m spending more of my money on logistics than I am on sourcing inventory, the first problem.
Second problem, I’m spending more of my time helping the business owners that I’m buying from, as opposed to dealing with the growth of my own business. And there was something wrong with that. So I started looking at our own business model and trying to see how we could change that business model.
Then in 2019, I started applying for maybe opportunities to go into business incubators. So I was very fortunate to be accepted onto the Antler Global Incubator Program, which was just launching their African footprint. So I was accepted into the first cohort of Antler, a pre-seed incubator that finds what they call exceptional leaders who are going to use technology, harness technology to solve Africa’s biggest problems.
Under Antler I had 12 weeks of pure go back to the problem and solve the problem, and find out what the problem is. Not how you imagine the problem to be, what is the actual problem, go to market, talk to the people who you are trying to serve, have as many focus groups, as many hackathons, as many mentoring sessions as you can in that 12 week period, and then build from there.
I was told to get rid of the solution that I had, which was my previous business, and really go back to falling in love with the problem. And that experience was pivotal for me, because it allowed me to immerse myself with what happens in Nairobi, in Kenya, I was out in the market.
I was talking to artisans and creatives, understanding their pain points. I was also talking to buyers who, like myself, find it very challenging to source from Africa. And so out of that 12-week period emerged a completely new business, Meekono, whose purpose is to bring together those two sides of the market, the vendors and the buyers.
Because there’s a gap and nobody is closing that gap because people are coming up with solutions that don’t work for the African vendors. And so Meekono is dealing with those issues of product market fit, quality control, and the lack of information that artisans and creatives have about the end market.
So they make products and in their own world, this is what I make, my grandmother made it, the next guy is making this product. Instead of saying what is the market out there and what they need and what they want.
And our job is to help them add value to their products so that they can create premium products instead of just what we call very value level products that don’t give them the money and the reward that they spent. That is commensurate with the amount of time they spend learning their craft and creating these beautiful products.
We are also about aggregating this market. Some of the issues around high cost of logistics and they’re all about fragmentation. The reason why there’s a lot of problems with getting logistics and service providers to charge as little as they charge, let’s say, in other parts of the world is because the market is very, very fragmented.
Our job at Meekono is to consolidate and aggregate all of the activities that artisans and creatives are involved in. So we can create economies of scale when it comes to sourcing packaging. Instead of everybody buying 50 and there’s a hundred of them, how about we buy 5,000 at a discounted price and then we share that benefit.
How about instead of one artisan going to attend a trade show in New York and they spend 20,000. We bring together 20 of them and they each spend 1,000. So we’re trying to democratize information and we’re trying to aggregate access to information and markets and services so that everybody can benefit and we can create sustainable incomes, we can create jobs and we can create real market access for a lot of these artisans.
What were the challenges that you faced when you launched Meekono and how did you overcome them?
I came to the accelerator in the end part of 2019. I then returned to London in 2020 and was about to launch Mikono and then Covid hit. And so the world shut down. I think people had priorities. The priority was to survive, to survive through Covid not a lot of people were interested in beautifying their homes or anything like that in the early days.
And so that was a challenge to which the response was pretty, it was a difficult response, but it was a pretty straightforward one. We’re going to put everything on hold with regard to launching this business. But in the meantime, we’re going to work behind the scenes, you know, in the kitchen, we’ll still be cooking and chopping up and doing everything behind the scenes.
So that was the first challenge that we faced. And it was now a question, it was an existential question of will we continue or not? But we moved forward in the belief that this thing will pass and we will pick up from where we left off.
The second challenge that I think we faced was even though we had created this marketplace, which operates very much like, let’s say an Uber. It’s about trust. So what we’re saying is, if you are an artisan or a creative, list your products on the platform and a retailer or a business out there will buy.
So we’re not matching consumers, we’re matching the retailers who sell to consumers with the artisans. And most of these retailers are independent small retailers who want to buy in small bulk. The problem we faced pretty soon after we started listing the creatives was that their products were not being represented in to create the highest value possible.
Either it was products we’ve seen before, many times over, which are not differentiated, or if they are great and they’re differentiated, the storytelling element is not told. Because within the handicraft and creative sector, a lot of it is about storytelling and branding.
I’m not selling a refrigerator, I’m not selling a TV. I just need to show you, if I’m selling a TV, I just show you a picture and I give you the spec, end of story. But if I’m selling you a pair of earrings that took me a week to make, in order for you to spend your money. You need to understand this pair of earrings. It took me a week to make this.
And I learned how to make these earrings from my grandmother, who spent two years teaching me. The culture behind it is Mangaian culture, these earrings were used by the bride. They were worn by a bride for her wedding, and it was part of the dowry, et cetera. That is what gets people to buy the product. And that’s what I learned from my first business.
Another thing is I need to take good quality pictures. I can’t put the earrings on the floor and then take a picture. And end of story, somebody’s going to pay for it. So we realized that the branding and merchandising and storytelling was something that was missing with a lot of the people trying to sell their products on the platform.
So we started putting out information. We started sharing how-to guides on our platform. Now, the problem that we faced with that was creatives are creatives. They don’t have time to be doing this anywhere in the world. Creatives are busy creating. They don’t want to be reading long documents.
We realized that we need to make the information that we share in a form that is easy to digest if you’ve got very little time or you don’t really are not interested in reading. So, we’re going through a process now of making our content palatable for a broad range of creatives.
So that if I don’t know how to take a picture of my basket that I’ve made. I just go on there and within five minutes, and I understand, oh, okay, with my phone, I can still take great pictures, but I just need to find the right light. I need to make sure the setting is right. And also I need to tell the story behind the thing.
That was, it was about the skills gaps that a lot of the creatives faced. That was the second challenge that we had. We have other challenges that we face, some of which are within our control, others which are not.
And so we are looking at getting strategic partnerships. A big challenge that creatives face is lack of funding, lack of access to funding. They don’t have enough funding to even do product development. So if I am a Maasai beader and my grandmother taught me how to bead.
But I don’t even have enough money to play around with, what if I change the color from white and red and black to yellow and blue? How am I going to afford those yellow beads when I don’t even have enough money to do that? So a lot of the creatives don’t even have financing for, let’s call it startup capital.
Not much, I mean, it doesn’t need much, but it’s still money that they could be spending on paying school fees or buying food or paying rent. Then what happens when somebody places an order? Let’s say a boutique in London decides to place an order for a hundred units. Where am I going to get the money to buy the materials to fulfill that order?
These are the challenges that the creatives actually face. So as Meekono, we realized very quickly that rather than just putting a marketplace in front of artisans and saying, here’s your marketplace, sell, we now need to address some of these issues and prove the concept to third parties in the financial sector who maybe have skepticism around, is this a financially viable model?
So we are now investing as Meekono in some product development work for artisans to say, you are fantastic at making baskets. We will help you with materials to make the basket in this shape or in this color or in this style. And if you can sample, then we will upload the product image onto our platform.
If you get an order, then you’re good. We’re gonna get a deposit from the buyer, etc. So we are helping artisans and creatives with that burden. We’re taking off the burden of doing product development. We’re helping them by assisting them to make products that differentiate them.
Because it’s the same as, let’s say, if you walk into a market and you find 10 women selling tomatoes. Whose tomatoes are you gonna buy at the end of the day? You buy the one who gives you the lowest price, probably. And so we don’t want that in the creative space. We don’t want the race to the bottom.
We actually want artisans to be uplifting and adding value to their products by differentiating, by doing quality control. But all of those things cost money. So we are addressing some of those issues there by doing so. We have other plans in place in terms of partnering with third-party financiers to help us and join us in this. But we want to prove the concept first.
And I think one final one, which is a big one, is the aggregation piece of observing that all of the creatives who do export. They have an account with the shipping companies. And they get a rate, but it’s still a high rate. They’re still being given a retail rate.
And we want to be able to negotiate a wholesale rate that all the artisans in this country now come under the umbrella of this one account. And we’re going to get a discount that is similar to the bigger operators who ship in volume. So we want to drive down the cost of shipping in doing so.
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How do you raise funds for your business in order to support creatives who need money in product development?
I’m sure that you understand the challenge of raising funding in Africa. The challenge of getting startup capital investors is that kind of thing in Africa. And the statistics are not very positive for somebody who’s like me, a woman of a certain age. Though the challenge is even more so for somebody like me.
So I realized that even though that is a challenge, it shouldn’t be the thing that stops us moving forward. So we started out with a small grant under the Tony Elumelu Foundation. With that, we were able to build our website with that grant and sort of keep the lights on for a little bit. And the rest of the time, it was about bootstrapping this business.
The bootstrapping involves putting in whatever you can afford as and when you go, keep the lights on, keep the bills paid. But then it also gives you a discipline around being very efficient with your costs. So we run a tight budget. Thankfully, as an online business and as a technology enabled business, we don’t have huge fixed costs.
We don’t have an office. We use co-working spaces. And we’re very smart with how we outsource some of our labour. We have a flexible operating cost base, which means that we can keep the money that’s coming in and be able to meet the costs that we have.
Recently, we were awarded a grant, a UK government grant called Innovate UK. And that one is specifically to enable us to automate the work that we’ve been doing with the upscaling. I mentioned that we have a lot of content that we share. We do a lot of mentoring workshops and master classes for artisans.
And we realized that if we’re delivering all of these one-to-one, there’s not enough people in the world and hours in the day to do it. So we are now automating that so that artisans and creatives can access that information on their smartphone. And so the grant enables us to do that.
It also enables us to enhance the platform so that artisans have more assistance on their journey into wholesaling, on their journey into exporting. And so I would say that the road to getting funding has not been easy. We move forward because we have such a strong belief that this business model works.
And that we are willing to invest in these early stages so that we can create a pipeline of strong products. When we are selling those products on behalf of our vendors, of our artisans, we share in that uplift. So we are building the foundation of this business so that it can then become the revenue that we earn from the sales that we make is something that we can share with both ourselves as well as the creatives.
And that’s the model that we’re approaching, we’re taking. In the meantime, we also harness strategic partnerships a lot. So we’re always looking for strategic partnerships that give us benefits in kind, not always cash. We are always looking for funding. We’re looking for grant funding. And we are looking for assistance with the training and upscaling all the time.
What is your business model and how does Meekono generate revenue?
Meekono is a social enterprise. It’s a full-profit social enterprise. And we have two pillars that we operate on. One is the nonprofit element, the social impact piece, and then the other is very much a revenue generating entity or income stream.
So I’ll start with the non-profit element, which is the, what we call artisan empowerment piece. That is the part where you find us doing the product development. You will find us delivering the upskilling, the training, the mentoring. You will find us doing the advocacy work.
So talking to strategic partners, to policy makers, and other stakeholders to try and get this whole sector into a better place. The artisans who access those services do it for free. All the creatives on there, we’re democratizing all of that so that we create a healthy big population of creatives who are making good products, because that’s our underlying objective.
Now, the revenue earning part of our business is where those same products that have been created as a result of the upscaling of the artisans, they now come onto the marketplace and we sell them.
Our business model takes a commission and the commission is based on a markup. So if a product costs a certain amount, let’s say $10 per unit, we add our commission on top so that when buyers are purchasing the products they are paying a little bit of a finder’s fee. And this is typically the model that import exporters use or intermediaries.
They buy and add their mockup when the buyer makes the purchase. And if we have been involved the mockup depends on how much intervention Meekono has had in the value addition on that product. If we have a creative who has a fully finished piece that we’ve had no intervention in, the mockup is smaller.
But if we have been involved in the product development, if we’ve been involved in doing some quality control, if we’ve been involved in doing any element that adds value to that product, then the commission that we take is more. But the uplift will also benefit the artisan and the creative.
So it’s in both our interest as well as the creative’s interest to get the value of that product up as much as possible because both of us gain. Our revenue earning piece is about creating as many good quality products, engaging as many buyers as possible so that the artisans are fully employed the entire year in serving those markets.
Since you launched, what strategies have you used in attracting and retaining these creatives and retailers?
So the analogy I like using is like saying, if you’re building a shopping mall, you can’t invite the customers into an empty shopping mall. You need to fill up the shopping mall with the right sellers, the right shops and brands that all align with the overall branding and image of the shopping mall.
In these early days of Meekono, a lot of our energy and focus has been on attracting the artisans and vendors, that’s not been too difficult. What we found is that there are many creatives who have exhausted or they’ve reached the capacity of their local market and they want to expand, they want to grow.
The only problem is that they don’t know how. So our work in attracting them has been around prospecting, engaging with them and explaining to them what we do. Even though a lot of them have reached the ceiling, many of them haven’t done wholesaling to the extent that we are offering.
So it’s about explaining that to them. And once we’ve explained the vast majority of creatives we engage in that process, we achieve them signing up onto the platform. We currently have over 200 SMEs or creative businesses that are signed up on Mekono right now. The next stage in that process is getting people in the door of the metaphorical shopping mall.
And the middle part of that was getting the right products. So we’ve been involved in product development and we now are literally about to enter a process of our go-to market. However, we’ve had organic interests, so we have people reaching out to us as buyers saying, I found you on Google, or I saw you on LinkedIn, and I’d like to place an order.
And we’ve had those organic engagements from buyers and we’ve not really been pushing too hard. Our first pipeline of good quality products is about to hit the markets in January, 2025, which is a great time. Because in the Northern hemisphere, that’s when retailers are stocking up for the summer season. And most of our products are summer ready products, because Africa is hot.
So we make products for hot weather. We are going to hit the trade shows. So they are specialist trade shows in Europe and in North America, where tens of thousands of buyers attend these events. And we are going to attend those with a selection of our products so that buyers can actually see the quality and touch and feel these products and engage with us.
Another thing is we do have a digital marketing strategy that we engage whereby we are telling our story all the time. So you can find Meekono on various platforms. We’re on Instagram, of course. We’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, and we have our website.
We are also attracting people from organic searches on Google. Also we have a business development strategy, which involves reaching out directly to the retailers. So it’s a multi-pronged approach. We do have an uphill battle. Unfortunately, there’s stigma and perception when people from outside Africa are buying African products.
We recognize that, which is why we really try to adopt very high standards when it comes to our storytelling, the quality of our service because good service is free. We really try to keep those elements of our interface with customers of a very high standard. So that people get comfortable and they understand everything that we do.
Including the products that we’re promoting are of a high standard and competitive if you compare them against products made anywhere else in the world. We are standing by that to say our products are just as well made and as competitively priced.
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What’s your approach to hiring and building the team?
That’s an emotive topic. I believe that you can be a solopreneur, but it’s tough. I think being an entrepreneur is tough anyway. To do it solo is extremely difficult. I understand this because my first business, I did it solo for a few years before engaging partners.
I knew the benefits of having a partner. So with the launching of Meekono, I had a couple of false starts, a couple of dating experiences and breakups, and a couple of engagements, breakups. Realizing that it’s better to say goodbye quickly than to drag things on and on and on and have the energy drained out of you.
So thankfully, I do have a co-founder. We had met in a previous life in London when I was doing my business, and she was also doing hers. So she has been through a similar journey to me. She was sourcing products from Africa. And so she fully understands the challenges. Where our journey was kind of diverted was when I came to launch Meekono and she decided to go back to university and do a degree in design.
So she combines experience and now prior to launching her business, she also worked in e-commerce, big sort of like tech e-commerce businesses. So she comes with complementary skills to me, but very much sort of common ground and a common purpose to mine.
She brings business development expertise, e-commerce, as well as the design element, which is crucial for us when we’re doing product development. And I am bringing more banking, finance, operational experience and some of the understanding of the journey and the upscaling element. So we make a very good compliment.
Now with regard to the rest of the team, we do have a small team. It’s scattered around. We’ve got footprints in South Africa, Malawi and in the UK, as well as Kenya. Kenya has been a really good place for us. Neither of us are Kenyan, but the Kenyan market is a very unique place because it combines creativity, which is rich in cultural heritage.
We all know about the Masai and many other creative sources in Kenya. There is also a heavy presence of technology and startup culture. There’s a hustle culture here. And it’s a very hospitable environment for somebody who wants to start up a business.
People are open-minded and a lot of things work, and so it’s a good place for a person to plant this. So we’ve got a presence in all of those countries. We’re a remote team. We work online. Some people in our team have never met each other, but we have a setup which simulates a virtual office.
We are mindful all the time of the disadvantages of being a remote team. And so we try to make up for it by having a lot of virtual face-to-face contact, a lot of meetings, and a lot of transparency. And by promoting a culture of openness and collaboration among us, and also making sure that people are covered.
So people are not working in silos and just doing their own thing and disappearing. We understand that we need to create that culture in order for the team to work effectively.
How is Meekono doing today and what does the future look like?
It’s an exciting time. We’ve got some strategic partners, we’ve got a memorandum of understanding signed with some key strategic partners and we’ve got a number in the pipeline.
We are finally making traction in terms of gaining champions and gaining ambassadors and advocates who really understand what it is we’re trying to do. Because I think the struggle for a lot of startup founders is, I know it, I know it, it’s in my head, but people don’t get what I’m trying to do.
Investors don’t understand and other people don’t understand what it is I’m trying to do. But we are finally in a place where more people understand what we’re trying to do and they’re saying, oh yes, either I share common ground with you, let’s partner. Or I understand what you’re trying to do, please help me, or I will help you, I will support you and I will connect you to others.
We’re in that season where we’re beginning to see the seeds that we planted, we’re beginning to see the green shoots come up. We are in negotiation to deliver some upscaling like focused, tailored upskilling for a group of businesses here in Kenya. And we think that will open more doors because again, as I said, I think with business, a lot of the time you’re trying to prove the concept.
People understand tangible outcomes. Not a lot of people understand dreams and visions. People want for you to go to them and say, this is what we’ve done and here is that tangible outcome of what we’ve been working on.
So we are finally in that place where we have various things, whether it’s the project for technology, the innovation project, which has a couple more months before we complete it, or a product development, which also is a month before we have these products. We are in that space where we’re about to really see a change ramping up and scaling up of what we’re doing.
What do I see as the future of Meekono? Just to go back one step, I think it’s very very important to outline the potential that’s there, that we’re only aiming for just a part of that potential. The global handicrafts and creative market is worth over $850 billion. That’s the value of the global handicrafts market.
Almost half, just 49% of those products originate from the global south. And I’m talking about South Asia, East Asia, South America and Africa. Of that, Africa has less than 2% share of that amount. And yet we make up a substantial youth and women population. That is really the bulk of the artisanal space.
And we are tracking far behind other areas like India. When I talk about untapped potential, that’s what I mean. A lot of the creatives in Africa cannot make a full-time living from their creative pursuits and what I want to see is every artisan earning enough money to pay their rent, pay their kids’ school fees and earn a decent living, fully focused on their craft and not having to rely on relatives.
I would like to see every artist, which is why we’re democratizing that information piece. We’re democratizing tools that will help them, even if they’re not exporting. Not every artisan is destined to export. But even if they are selling in their national market, I would love to see every artisan at least make a decent living out of their craft.
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What advice would you give to entrepreneurs, especially women who are starting their business?
I’m going to start with the bitter advice, which is, as a woman, you probably will not get investors in the way that is typical for other demographics. So you have to be creative. You may have to keep your day job for longer than you thought so that you can at least use the day job to fund the business.
Or you may have to have a side hustle that is assigned to your business. I think especially if you’re purely for profit, you may find that you are the one who is your only investor into your business. But even if you’re building slowly through just dripping money into your business from your other pursuits at least you’re moving forward.
If you are in the nonprofit space or if you’re in the social enterprise space, there’s a lot of gender positive grants and funding out there. And so just be confident in your story and get it right.
Find coaches, supporters, mentors, and join groups. There’s so much I’ve benefited from being part of women entrepreneurial groups. And there’s a narrative around women not helping each other and supporting each other. There are women who really support each other. Find those women.
Don’t be shy or hold your story in and your business in. A lot of women I meet say, I don’t want to tell people what I’m doing because they might copy my ideas. They might copy your idea. They’re not gonna copy your execution. Only you know how to execute your idea. So let them copy.
But at the end of the day, if you are really good at what you’re doing and you put all your passion and creativity and hard work around it. It really doesn’t matter if they copy your ideas. Just because you’re out there doesn’t mean you have to be the only one, especially women in the creative space.
Within the creative space, there are millions of fashion brands out there that are thriving because they found their customers. They found their ideal target customers who shop from them. And I would give the same advice to people who are like, I’m a creative, but I don’t want to show my designs because people will copy it. Forget that. Just keep moving forward and keep creating.
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