Kenyan Entrepreneur Starts Online Business

For Wahida Mohammed, a young mother of three with a conservative Muslim background, striking a balance between home life and business matters a lot. But for this entrepreneur, online marketing has enabled her to embrace both passions in her life.

On a typical day, Wahida Mohammed conducts business from her home in Kizingo estate Mombasa, Kenya, while the children play around the house. Attending to the demands of the day, a message pops into her email account – in comes another order –  she picks up her phone and calls her shop assistant in town with instructions to make a package and deliver it to a courier. A few hours later the package arrives in Nairobi.

For Wahida, this is just another easy transaction thanks to E-commerce.  Wahida is the founder of an online shop  www.styleconnection.co.ke which stocks retail and wholesale high street fashion clothing, accessories and beauty products.

In 2009 Wahida set up a boutique operating in a small stall along Makadara Street in Mombasa’s old town. In her quest to distinguish herself from her competitors, Wahida started an online shop, the first of its kind in Mombasa.

With an amount of roughly 1240 (US$) Wahida established a website and began her E-shop. Today she reckons she receives more than 20 orders everyday from online clients outside of Mombasa town.

A self confessed shopaholic Wahida stumbled into the business two years ago. According to Wahida, her fine taste in fashion trends meant that friends would often request her expertise on shopping outings.

I used to buy fancy clothes and perfumes and later sell to my friends. Since I wanted to know every new trend in the market I began shopping online, after a while I opened a boutique.

From her own experience in online buying, Wahida knew that opening an online shop would help her reach a wider clientele, as well as offer a quick and easy way for clients to avoid the hustle and bustle of shopping.

With the click of a mouse I can sell products to a client in Nairobi. This is convenient for working people, a secretary in an office in Mombasa town can easily take a look at my display without having to leave the office and come to my shop.

Wahida adds that the web shop has helped her juggle her life between motherhood and business. She says

Women, especially from the Muslim community, should drop the excuses of not venturing into entrepreneurship due to family obligations.

One of her biggest business challenges however has been to penetrate the online business market in Mombasa where people have not fully embraced online shopping. She laments that despite the fact that deliveries are made for free within the town, most people visit the website to look at the displays but not to make orders online. Instead, they insist on coming to the shop to prove that the items they saw online are available, and then only make purchases.

She hopes to expand her client network worldwide so as to sell her goods across country borders.