https://www.youtube.com/embed/91sbzUXkf18
i'm going to uh spotlight her video right now so this is jacqueline thanks for coming on so she's based on the uk uh she lived in four different continents she's been in the fashion industry for over 16 years now um let me just make sure i don't butcher your your life over here exactly so she have been doing that for over 16 years she works wrote a couple of books so she's an author she's a speaker she's supposed she has spoken at uh fashion conferences around the world um you know definitely established uh she's passionate about african fashion all aspects of it from sourcing design all the way down to delivery and making money she created a um consultants consultancy company and she has a a platform um essentially to help people like you me you know turn our passion into a uh successful business did i miss something did that bridget please keep me honest jacqueline there's so many things i can say hello everybody um jacqueline shaw and i go by the term african fashion business coach um and um justin from the uk you can hear my accent and um i'm been working in the fashion industry for nearly 20 years i don't physically work in the industry um right now i don't work in the fashion industry literally right now as a designer as i used to be but that's what i was doing is working for brands like puma um russell athletic feeler um a retailer called cna which is like a walmart you can think of a target um in europe as a designer so i do sportswear swimwear design casual men's women's and i've done kids and babies but mostly women's and their mens but that's been my background professionally as a career and then 10 years ago exploring my own heritage from being british born to jamaican parents and first generation british born jamaican and to parents um who've come over but my grandfather um was from a group of people called the maroon tribes and they were seen as runaway slaves in the caribbean islands in jamaica in haiti and some other places around the caribbean and it made me want to explore a bit more i've always been exploring african history but i wanted to explore more about the maroon people and the links to africa that's what led me on uh an amazing journey um through africa i've been traveling to various countries haven't been to all yet that's my mission uh but to go to various countries and meeting with manufacturers artisans um everybody does things with textiles manufacturing footwear apparel printing everything homeware all kinds of product to do with arts to do it textiles and fashion so um now because of that because i did that i explored this i did a master's degree in ethical fashion where i focused on africa's um supply chain from cotton through to the retail manufacturing designers fashion shows the whole industry and i now help brands retailers and designers who want to get into africa who want to explore their region for their sourcing and textile and sourcing like manufacturing garment manufacturing and more so yeah i'm a business coach now i'm a consultant and i do that for small brands as well as larger organizations and yeah i've been speaking in various events like the house of lords um fit college in new york um italy i've spoken out there and just various places around the world so yeah i love it and i'm here to speak to you a bit more about that and help you to explore that for yourself perfect thank you jacqueline appreciate it so for the benefit of because you you have so much expertise in the wide waiter injury area sorry for the the benefit of uh channeling your expertise in to our audience today there is a questionnaire that folks have filled out i hope you can see it um so we do have 70 percent of folks who have answered so i'm just going to end it and and share the results so you can see can you say jacqueline i can where are you in your journey of building a confessional business okay okay so three quarters have an idea okay but now that's weird that's fine so here's how i'm going to start i do have a question i'm just going to post my question and we're going to get into the breakout rooms and the group uh group work so essentially i wanted to get your thoughts on i mean obviously most of us if not all of us are are africans and i was just curious to know if fashion african fashion doing business or sourcing in africa is it more a is it a sound business decision or is it or is it more a sentimental one because we want to do business back home with folks back home does it make business sense or no and the reason one of the reasons why i post this question is a couple years ago i you know i was trying to get in there myself and i googled it and all the suppliers were out of china right so there was a a bunch of items on um i actually ordered them on uh aliexpress uh if you guys know about it so i saw a couple of things i was thinking once you and i started talking i was thinking well why are we talking about africa is it because you know we're african and we love you so much or is it does it make you know the most business sense i'll let you enlighten us from that okay so things are everything is cheaper in china let's just put it that way everything is cheaper in china um because they've got the supply chain there they've got expertise for a long season and they've had investments or you know they've got a more dynamic industry set up there so if you want to just do a business that may be african-inspired then i would say if you want to go to china that's purely done to you i do i do support um african trade i do encourage those who work with me or who come under or in my community to look into trading with africa because when you can when you're doing trade you're increasing the gdp of a country in this case multiple countries and that is what's going to change um um industries it's going to change um things like job creation and so forth it's going to be all going to be invested into our country so if you're always say if you are there getting like wax print fabrics which is typical people call the african print and you're getting that from china because there's many producers in china but then you're going to be manufacturing the garments in your home country but you're not even touching africa but you're calling it african fashion brand you're not really supporting the continent so it isn't cheap it is it's more expensive to do in africa it's more challenging it's more work and that's why you need to have a that's what i want i set up what i'm doing to be that guide for people because i've done it myself i've set up my own business so i'm not just talking from you know my behind um i set it like this i think of my own plus i've got my industry experience and i brought the two together so it's definitely going to be a decision that you choose to make some people do stuff because oh you know my mother my auntie my grandmother is from nigeria wherever i live whatever jews in nigeria but that may not be the best country for you in africa but you can still kind of some people do have that sentimental kind of reason why they explore um making in africa perfect thank you makes a little sense now we're going to get into the um the the group i call it the group study essentially so a couple instructions number one i'm going to present what the the case is and then you guys going to get into rooms you know a couple maybe two three together for about three minutes and then um i think what my suggestion is that the first thing that you guys want to do is speak who is going to talk right here's what's going to happen you guys want to go group group you're going to try and answer the question or figure out the best way to answer the question then you guys going to come back uh together and then jacqueline is going to assess the the answers that you guys are going to provide and uh we'll take it from there that's going to be a 30 seconds uh countdown right just let you know hey we're about to uh close the breakout room does it make sense any question no good all right cool let me try and set it up i don't want to mess it up uh right now so i'm going to first and first of all create the rooms and then i'm going to broadcast it um so let's do four to five people all right just gonna set it up right now uh so 30 seconds let's say three minutes and okay um are we all back yes we are all back okay who wants to who wants to go just put your hand up and i'll uh and i'll let you uh okay is it rose did i see would you hand up okay it's janet rose janet rose dunkley yeah okay you get ahead you um i hear not even not enough time okay you you go ahead give you provide your uh your perspective and i'll have jacqueline um okay so i what we suggested um is that because we already have some type of seed money we would go with um seeking out the the demand because we know we have the supply coming from the source in in in those countries so we're going to go with the the demand and how would we define it get the demand we're going to start off with friends and family we know that the best form of advertising is word of mouth and once we once that grows and we can go out to our cold market and reach the masses and then we can start going on social media and advertising even bigger so to speak so that's that was our suggestion and just to put it in a nutshell thank you i'll just get somebody else um another person who's who volunteers who's a volunteer wants to go don't be shy is that stevia no clara you want to go um just hold on yeah go go ahead claire okay um we we hadn't picked a person to to speak in our group but um i believe we agreed that our first priority would be finding out whether there was a market for for our idea because it's just an idea and as one of our members mentioned is it would be best to get into a particular niche find your consumers and then build on that before you put money into it okay thank you now the expert um should we get yeah let's just get one more one more person um yes you uh let me just send you well in my group we didn't get to appoint somebody can you hear me yeah i could hear you um but one of our team members suggested that it's um after the idea you should know your customers first when you get the idea at least get to know your customs and everything well so when they missed out being stamina before our time ran out but um yeah she suggested new york customer okay thank you appreciate it uh jacqueline you go ahead with your uh expertise and enlighten us what uh what do you think we're good or bad or are we what would your recommendations be okay i got a lot to share um um let me just see okay so yeah so um in in the group i was in i agree with well everybody said it's great first of all um but you definitely need to have the customer there before you push something out um these days there's so many ways to do that and what i have in when i do my training with my um i've got a membership club and what i do is my my customers my clients my students in in my membership club or in my coaching clubs is that talk about um the three pre-actions so the pre-actions are you can pre-sell pre-validate okay and you can that must do with the sourcing but don't worry with your customers you can pre you can pre-validate them so that means that you're going to ask people questions you want to know what it is that is of interest to that kind of person you may have an idea of this is the type of person your ideal customer avatar this is the kind of person that you know would buy your product okay um you've got a name for them you've got a life for them and you're speaking to them but you want to ask them questions you want to put surveys out of somebody you said you can go into facebook groups or other forums and listening to people look at the questions that they're saying answer their questions yourself you know give you some value but you can then learn from them what is it that they need what is it that they're missing what language are they speaking you make notes of these things so when you're then putting out your messaging and your content prior to launching you're going to speak in the language of that person so i knew that the people that were coming to me they were concerned their fears were that they don't have the fashion experience they want to start but they don't have industry experience or they've never traveled to africa so can they actually start a business in africa they don't have contacts in africa and the biggest thing i'm gonna get ripped off that's what happens isn't it but there's all these fears and concerns and i would speak that language i'll speak to the fears i'd speak to the desires and this is what you would do and all of this is called seeding so prior to a launch of a product you want to see this is a marketing strategy and tactic you see things you don't talk about the product right yet but you're seeding it you're getting people excited you're getting them interested like where is that i just launched a project a new program sorry and i got it more it was filled by um 150 of what i planned because i took a whole month to seed the concept without even mentioning so when it was open everybody jumped in they were bought already i hadn't even created the thing to start with but then i worked out is it of interest to them yes and then they bought so these are some some tactics that you can be using i'd like to train my uh my members on this as well on how to do these things so you want to call people out you're going to convert them and then you want to court them which means going on a date with them making them feel nicer that they stay as a customer there's so many people i can share but that's giving you some of the insights perfect so looks like we're all back on i picked one two three four five sorry folks to uh provide their the answers armelle nancy i think and search so um our mel you look so excited so i'll let you uh i'll let you go ahead and start out first um i think we kind of go along the same way uh it really depends on where you are in terms of uh your business or you you know if you're a small player or you're not any type of you're not just going to go and fly africa and talk to people there i think the first thing you do is always trying to get some type of contacts um um you can do some online research get some names get suppliers um we're getting more data from africa i mean it's always the hardest part about doing business in africa is getting reliable data but now we start to get some data um you get to talk to people first before you even travel there but eventually you got to go on the ground yourself and talk to those people but initially you do some initial research and get some contacts and maybe exchange a couple of times on the phone before you even schedule a trip to africa thank you romero uh nancy what are your thoughts uh here if you don't mind immune my group i was saying that this for me i have maybe some contacts on the ground which could probably go check for me um maybe send pictures and stuff but my other members in the group also mention two things that it depends on you may have to do research on what type of crafts people want um and then you may also have to hire a consultant who is an expert in the field and thirdly it depends on the value chain if you're at the beginning or at the end of the value chain are you the person buying from the retail person at the end then you ship and then you sell are you buying in bulk so depending on what level whether you're at the beginning or the end of the value chain will depend will determine how how you go about it thank you um i hope i'm presents pronouncing that right yes you are shuka okay thanks what were your group uh opinion on this or direction of this okay so um our group kind of um use a mirage of the option so we kind of feel like we use a little bit of everything so initially we use our friends and family that we already have on the ground they would kind of be the qualifiers or the referrers and kind of let us know the options opportunities that we have on the ground in terms of finding suppliers um once we have that then we we then think that we need to go on the ground we do believe that you need to go to the ground to see what the products are you need to hold them you need to be able to speak to the suppliers understand the needs and how you can get those items but we do also say that once you kind of create that um or establish that relationship with the suppliers that's when you can continue to leverage like online like zoom or like join me along with google to continue the relationship and continue the business so it's kind of a little bit of both leveraging all those little aspects um to kind of help along the chain thank you um let me find i hope i'm pronouncing egoma or yoma we do feel like it's much better to of course traveling back to africa would be an expensive uh trip and um we feel that it's better to leg on already existing connections back home friends and family friends people we know who know someone in sourcing out suppliers and get sense of done and um and like we also felt like what level you are in your fight and um you know doing a little bit of everything stages will not be uh it's probably too exciting uh consulting a brand was like a very well established experience and there's more money maybe you could get um we could explore the instruments of a consultant at stage a level that most of us are we feel like that then we could do it because of everything uh ourselves getting them sourcing contacts from countries already back in africa and um you know pushing it from there okay thanks it was cutting out a little bit um on on your end but let's have jacqueline provide her expertise on what you could gather from what was said okay um so again from the time i started my business 10 years ago this was one of the main questions where can i source an africa who should i work with on which countries these were the three key questions i kept being asked and um i made a mistake like what many people do which is go to friends and family in my case friends obviously because my family are from jamaica but you know i got i got in trouble i got in trouble and this is somebody with a load of experience in fashion we got in trouble because i didn't validate that person sometimes we think okay our family's on the ground they they're there they can go and find people and then they're just gonna look for the what i call the one one tater on the roadside with people who um who are there just selling them what they think is right for you but you have to validate that person you have to pre-vet them pre-validate do they have the skills i have a theory and a formula called the c2c formula and it's looking at their capacity and capability okay can actually do make the product that you are looking for can they can they scale to the level that you want to scale can they scale and grow with you not everybody that that says that they can make things can do what you need to do for your business can they do with the quality do they have the same standards for each piece that they make maybe your family may not be seeing this they may not be seeing this by their go and see one piece that's made um so unless you're industry people you may not necessarily know exactly what to look for um so i would say if the two main ways to do that my company where consultancy we are a sourcing agency so we've already got network of manufacturers artisan suppliers around the continent okay around the full continent so these have been validated pre-vetted i've visited many myself as i've mentioned so you would know that you've got somebody's a professional who's gone before you would know who would be right for you so you could come to my consultant and see there's one option another option you go yes you go visit yourself or you're going to trade shows if they're at a trade show you know they've been prevalent freely vetted and pre-managed okay internet many of the details are they're old um a lot of the data is not fully exist in africa yet so that's a challenge but i would say as much as possible try to avoid friends and family unless you know their industry and business people already thank you very much for that hi everyone search uh currently based in san francisco originally from burkina faso been in the u.s for about a good 13 14 years so my question goes back to the discussion point earlier around what is your first step do you find suppliers do you find markets and so forth and so on uh the answers that were provided they felt to me like very expensive and long-term uh endeavors so if if i need to make sure that i'm fully listening to potential clients and i'm having a really good knowledge of what those clients are right if i i could understand that if i'm selling wholesale but if i'm selling retail and i'm selling to individuals it feels to me like a very lengthy process or at least a very costly process right in terms of maybe i need to do focus groups and the likes and likes and rights so do you have an expedient way to validate the market that you may want to share you know maybe you know turning some dollars into some i don't know consultants or uh some other agencies that could help you quickly validate your idea instead of taking years in order to figure out exactly what your ideal customer is okay well you can come to me if you want me to do that you can come to me that's what i do i mean i hear what you're saying i i hear you and i know you want to get on with me but i do say this the slow route sometimes is the best route i've been doing this for 10 years so i've been to uh wagga dugou i've been to kaduna as well i went to see recently they set up a new cotton ginnery in um organic cotton in um and um you know sat with the trade ministers there with the president of the country and the kinah and taking photos with him and having lunch so you know there's it's a journey i couldn't do those things without the journey that i've taken okay um and the quick route is not always the best route but if you wanted to say you know for somebody who knows this information who can just get me the research that i need and can just connect me with the right people then that's what i would do but you you'd be paying me a fee so you'd have to ask yourself if you don't have that uh finances then k would you go over route yourself to go research over time or go visit yourself so there's either way it's going to cost time and money so the child the decisions will be down to you thank you uh we could get another one uh camaria i think is the is the name i hope i unbutchered that your your name go ahead and and you know first time obviously we know it where you at and where you from and a new question please yeah um and i'm in ottawa canada and my question is two two questions in terms of sizing we know that when anything is sown in other countries the sizes are a lot different so i know in how do we um uh how do we explain that to seamstresses and tailors in other african countries um to explain because i know even in terms of body size and shape you know in other countries you know there may be more familiar with the sizing there than you know um sowing for people here and then the other thing is um in terms of pricing accounting for shipping accounting for um exchange of currency and things like that like um and you still want to make a profit so do you have any experience with that where from one country to another and you also want to pay your seamstresses um and tailors fairly um so all of these things like i think that that's for me the hardest part because i always feel like i'm not making the profit i want to pay everybody's you know the same wages as maybe we have here in canada but really you know it's gonna be hard to do be while you're um you know yeah thank you but when it comes to the payment um thing there's something called uh the minimum wage versus the living wage so minimum wage when people people pay minimum wage you don't really want to be paying somebody minimum wage because that's what the government thinks is enough you want to pay the living wage that's in that amount of money they need uh per hour per month uh sorry per month to be able to live on realistically live on pay their bills take children to school to eat all of that stuff so you need to explore a country's living wages and you might want to double that some people double it because you might think it's really low but you want you may want to double it and then that is going to still be decent wage more than decent wage and it's going to be affordable for you now when it comes to the sizing i yes absolutely like i'm european um even in europe actually the sizes are different to the uk and then what size are different to the us and canada and even working in with japanese and they're completely different body sizes and so forth from chinese so it's different um so you usually when you do you usually send a measurement chart size size chart and then it's got all the figures on it so it's in european uh uk american sizes all together so the similar sizes and what the centimeters or inches would be in that depends their metrics are what are imperial um i always say to my clients who work with me is get your patterns and things made in your country get two versions send one out so that they know they can just cut from that pattern because not always you're going to get them to do the cutting plastic pattern cutting in that country barely just to do in your country send out unless you're working with an actual factory like a larger scale factory that have like gerber machines and all these pattern cutting machines and sizes and text and social setup then send your sample out send your measuring trial and patterns that's how i would do it thank you thank you next um nancy i believe you have a question so nancy where are you from where are you at and go ahead with your question please oh you missed me hi my name is nancy i'm from cameroon currently in toronto um my question now is with the lockdown that is happening is this if somebody wants to do this now how do we go about it with the lockdown attempts i'm having these ideas to do but i'm like let's lock down how do i even start talking to people how do i get these products here and secondly one thing that worries me is like people are buying like essential goods right now we get to that stage where people start buying clothes because now everybody's trying to buy like food hand sanitizer and medical stuff and my third question is if we get it here um what's the advice for maybe distribution like if i'm here and i have maybe clients in the u.s how do you advise your clients on their e-commerce or distribution online distribution okay so the lock down is is not it's not forever we know it's going to open up um and i will say you can have loads of ideas but i just launched another business okay within this time even though i've got multiple business i've just launched another one and it means that um my textiles are coming from africa but and i'm teaching people about this as well to set up their business we it's gonna take some time it's gonna take time to build that business and in this time should be where you're building your audience like i said call them out convert them into onto your email list and then court them this is not something that's like you think of it like dating you're not going to just go on a date straight away you want to take time to build your audience get them onto your email list newsletter list and start to quote them and send the messages and when you open up is coming then you know that they're going to want to buy it because it's the whole urgency factory as well that you're going to put in there um i've got the middle question but the last question um i mean you can work with um fulfillment centers in your country you can work with distributors locally that's what you can do i mean if you're going to be a small business you're probably not going to want to do that to start with because it's going to be an added cost so um it's really just going to be depending on the size of your business i don't know how big this is or how big your network is i forgot the middle question i'm sorry second question what's the second question answer the second okay never mind that's fine too late let me see okay the last uh the last person olga i believe is that the last one yes you go ahead and pause your uh your question okay can you mute yourself and pose a question so uh where are you from where you at where are you from and your question please i'm from cameroon and living in toronto um my question is um i started a business a couple of years ago i have a couple of of customers but i want to know what is your advice to increase my like to go out there and go how to have like more customers because i feel like i don't have the personality to go out there and speak about my business and like to talk talk to people and have more customers and i just and i feel like just going online is not enough so is there any type of personality to have or should i found find someone to go out there and find customer for me so that was my question do yourself i mean i'm i'm very introverted i'm not really this kind of person who's always out here but i've learned to do that because you know i never used to be the face of my business i used to be behind the scenes but i knew that i had to learn to be the face because people would hear about this jacket and sure they've read i've got a book called fashion africa and i had that people wanted me to speak at places so i needed to be in the front of my business people want to speak to you and i don't know if it's um you're french-speaking i can hear the accent and you're in an english-speaking or french and english-speaking country maybe if it's easy for you to do in french focus on french speaking um do it in french if it's more comfortable for you so you can just be relaxed at doing that but it would help if it's you later on you can get sales um people to go and sell for you but if you can do yourself or just get a business partner who would be the marketing sales in your face kind of person okay thank you we are uh we only have one minute left so let's just sneak in one quick question i believe uh chuca is the one who posed the the question and you're gonna wrap it up uh oh i guess she's not around i see her camera is closed let's go to anu or anu uh if i can find yeah yeah go ahead and and he's the last thank you i was going to ask them how can i obtain funding to grow or to sustain a fashion business because it could it's it's such a huge stream um spending out of my pocket all the time um trying to grow it and that's one of the reasons why i kind of like pulled back from the whole thing i don't know how other people are doing it but what advice do you have for someone like me who wants to sustain um a fashion business because the returns aren't as they aren't as um quick and they don't stay like whatever you already goes right back i mean i guess that's the case in every other business but how can i um receive funding i'll be honest um funding banks and things do not really like to fund fashion businesses because they don't see it as a it means a profitable business but they see it as a high high-risk business okay um i literally self-funded well i've always have funded my business i have leveraged been in a full-time job for most of my business life so i only stopped a few years ago working for somebody else so i funded it that way there are i mean right now there's tickle there's loads of grants and things out right now i don't know which country are in again but um if you're like you know here in the uk or things that i'm seeing there's government organizations that are giving grants and funding out right now if you can see things right now business loans even so there's some business loans here in the uk and government grant you do have to do funding applications so that's something that you might like i'm doing one at the moment but i'm getting a fund writer to do that for me um because they're more experienced they might need to get a fundraiser for the grants but business loans may be the way but you have to do your figures to make sure that you can um do that but leverage your job so that you can live your life and you can use some of that and then you you want to scale so as i say build a big big build for scale um and build it to sell so that you can then leverage some of that you put it back in you don't just take the money out and you spend it on your holidays and reinvest um yes you can can i quickly make a suggestion to the lady who just called about asked about the um getting funding uh sure i mean over time i want to be respectful of everybody's time but uh go ahead um if she's in the u.s i would suggest contacting the small business loan um at the sba administration because they are they're there especially for minority i hate the word minority but minority women they do have loans for minority women and if you have a good business plan you could go through them okay thank you and this is going to be the the last comment uh definitely there's a question here around contacting um jacqueline so obvious definitely that's going to happen uh thank you very much uh everybody i just want to give a round of applause to jack clean thanks for coming out
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