Being an entrepreneur can be daunting. However, if everything works out and you play your cards right, you could find yourself in the position that Johannah and Solomon Moriti from JO’M Cosmetics find themselves in: knocking on the door to the world.
Miriam Mannak from Black Business Quarterly website reports on how the husband and wife team from Cape Town have taken their cosmetics range to the global marketplace.
The driving force was my hair. I used to apply chemical products to relax and straighten my hair and to make it more manageable. The problem was that these products made it terribly dry and brittle,” Johannah revealed to the journalist. “The state of my hair made me think. I wanted to go back to natural or unrelaxed hair. I also wanted to keep it soft and manageable.” And this is where their company, JO’M, started.
Johannah is, by trade, a qualified analytical chemist and laboratory assistant, so she knows what she is doing when it comes to petri dishes and chemical compounds. She decided to come up with an entirely chemical-free product that would meet her needs. Three years later and Johannah had finally managed to come up with a product that was ready for the market. She revealed to Mannak some of the ingredients:
The final list of ingredients comprises various natural oils including extra-virgin olive oil and jojoba, as well as shea butter and various plant extracts. Apart from being a 100 percent natural product, free from parabens and perfume, it has not been tested on animals.
Solomon is a mechanical engineer and an MBA graduate, and he assisted his wife with the development of the range, which started off in their kitchen. “The kitchen sometimes looked like a downright nightmare. We used professional chemical instruments and glass equipment as well as our kitchen appliances, which included the electric mixer, pots, pans and other utensils,” he joked in the interview.
While the couple struggled initially, only being able to make 10 litres of product at a time and having to skip luxury buys because of their limited financial resources, they worked hard and word of mouth saw their products become favourites with friends, family and small salons who they would visit to promote their range.
Johannah revealed that banks and other investors declined their every application for loans as their business seemed too risky, so in the end friends and family lent them the capital.
We didn’t have collateral and our business plans and product were seen as too risky. Some family members even took out loans for us.
Since then, production of JO’M’s range has increased dramatically, with the company moving into a bigger production facility in Montague Gardens, and they not only provide a comfortable living for themselves but also a team of full-time and casual employees. The company has entered the marketplace with great success, and Johannah revealed that JO’M products can be bought in Clicks, Pick n Pay, Spar, Discom, Jet, Boxer, Jumbo and Shoprite stores, and that they were nominated as one of the seven finalist in the 2010 HiT Barcelona Global Entrepreneurship Competition. They have applied for certification in Europe and hope to be exporting products to that market by early 2012. If that wasn’t enough, cosmetics giant L’Oréal tried to buy the company recently. However, the Moritis revealed to Mannak, with a grin on their faces, that
there are too many opportunities to grow further than to sell right now.
