Pivot, Adapt, Grow: Building a Fashion Brand in Kenya

Starting a business is hard enough. But growing it can be exponentially harder — especially when crossing borders and continents and in a business as fickle as fashion. Wandia Gichuru is experiencing it all as founder and CEO of Vivo Fashion Group, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Gichuru thinks about her business beyond simply selling clothes. We can be “warriors for economic growth,” she explains. Hear her story of lucky breaks and quick pivots, strategic growth and purposeful passion.

Wandia Gichuru began her career in international development. Today, she sees her business in a similar light, and with even more passion. She believes the fashion industry has the potential to transform economies on the African continent because, as she explains, “They haven’t found a way for robots to stitch clothing. You need to hire people.” And, she continues, “It's not just the people behind the machines, it's also the designers, the cutters, the bundlers. It's the models, the makeup artists, the photographers. There's just an entire industry that I believe could contribute a significant percentage to our GDP.”

When Gichuru started her business, it was focused on selling dance and fitness clothing online to meet her own needs. Ultimately — by default, not design — she chanced upon a huge gap in the market: good-looking, comfortable, well-fitting clothes for African women’s body shapes and sizes. Luckily, she had a built-in focus group to identify customer needs. “When ladies spend an hour in your store trying on 20, 30 different things, they talk a lot. That's where we got our market research,” she says.

She began by importing clothes from Asia, but quickly pivoted to designing and producing locally. “The local fashion industry had become almost nonexistent. We got flooded by all the secondhand stuff. And so the local textile mills that existed in the ’70s and ’80s, one by one, they all shut down,” she explains. The production move was a big decision that not only differentiated her brand, but also improved her bottom line and impacted her community. 

After seven years, Gichuru had six stores and 70-plus employees. But, she admits that she didn’t have a proper strategy, an effective board, or the right systems and processes to truly scale. She admits, “I was completely overwhelmed.” Gichuru got help from the Stanford Seed Transformation Program, a 10-month program for CEOs and founders of established businesses in Africa and South Asia to help them grow and scale their companies. “One of the first things we did was the business model canvas, which asks you to articulate your value proposition and answer key questions like who are your customers? Who are your suppliers? What is your marketing? What are your channels?,” she reflects. This exercise gave Gichuru the start she needed to build a foundation for expansion. Today, Vivo has 20-plus stores, has expanded to Rwanda, and has plans to grow across East Africa — and one day, hopefully, across the Atlantic.

“I would love Vivo to get to that level. I think for so long, you know, people see Africa as a place you get your raw materials from and then you do your value add somewhere else, and then you either sell it back to us or wait till you use it and send it back here as a used thing. I just think we need to prove to ourselves and to the rest of the world that we're just as capable, and actually we can come up with solutions, products, and services that people outside of Africa will benefit from and need as much as we do,” she says with passion.

Listen to Gichuru’s entrepreneurial story from startup to scaling and hear how she’s growing both her impact and her bottom line. 

Learn more about the business model canvas used in the Seed Transformation Program.

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