Not many ladies have met Tara Fela-Durotoye before in person. But hundreds and thousands have heard about her brand and her exploits in the Beauty industry. Some use her beauty products.
A few days ago, this lovely lady who is the wife of motivational Speaker, Fela Durotoye, was one of the Speakers at The Platform,, founded by Lagos Pastor, Poju Oyemade for entrepreneural stories with a lot of upcoming entrepreneurs. She was invited to give a 21 minutes presentation at The Platform on the topic: Innovating Our Way Into The Future.
She started her presentation by informing her audience that she was wearing 3 hats on that day. One was that of the Founder/ CEO of a beauty company that is a Platform and a network to create entrepreneural opportunities for people in the Make Up and Beauty industry. Her second hat is that of an Entrepreneur who has built from the scratch, an internationally recognised Make-Up brand that is in an industry that was practically non-existent 25 years ago in Nigeria when she started. “I’m also wearing a hat as a Leader of a team of committed professionals, the Intrapreneurs we have been talking about who have been committed in the last two decades and they have been responsible for building the 8000 numbers of professional Make Up artists. And now, we have representations from diverse nationalities. People have come from Boswana, Namibia to Nigeria to come to our Make-Up Academy which was founded 20 years ago. Its not beans.”
“We have also trained and developed 15,000 Beauty Entrepreneurs who have become active players in the industry. Some of them have gone off to create their own brands for creating Job opportunities in the country and across the world. I think one of the ones that have most paid of is building a brand that can be franchised and so today, we have retail stores in all the major cities in Nigeria, in Lagos, Lekki, Amuwo Odofin, Surulere, Ikeja, Kano, Kaduna, Asaba, Uyo, Ibadan. But having said that, created 500 minimum, 500 products in a product line, the first indigenous Make-Up line in Nigeria, and we are talking about Foundations, Powders, Lipsticks and all the things that makes women more beautiful than they really are.
“But I stand here today as your product, I know that you all know that it is not easy to start a business, to build it, to grow it and in 25 years still standing, but I consider myself a product of Grace. So, today I bring to the Platform my own Enterpreneur Stories. I like stories. So, I’ll tell a lot of stories today and try to help us to see different angles on the subject of Innovating into the Future, and I am hoping that you will find useful tips as I present to you my own stories as well as you innovating into the future.”
A wise man once said, “The future is not a date on a Calendar to be revealed. The future is everything that you can be, but haven’t yet become. The future is everything that we can do but have not yet done. The future is everything that we can have but have nto yet possessed, the future is not ahead of us, the future is inside of us” I stole that quote from Mr. Fela Durotoye. So, our Challenge and Responsibility is to deliver the future. So, in my opinion, when I think about Innovation,. Innovation is the process of delivering that future, and many times we are thinking to ourselves; Is there Innovation in me? I’m not sure that there’s Innovation in me”, and I am going to share a scripture later on to confirm that there is truly Innovation inside of you if any you look into it. So, I saw a definition of Innovation that I really liked, “Innovation has been defined as the process of making an idea or mention into a good or a service that creates value and for which customers will pay”. Bola was talking about a big enough market earlier on. So they have to be able to pay, but the market also has to be big enough and that is what Entrepreneurship is.
Entrepreneurship on the other hand is your ability to be able to see Challenges as Opportunities. You have to have the ability to see challenges as opportunities. You also have to have the ability to create a Solution that can be packaged into a Products and served to a clientele base that is willing to pay for it because they’ve seen value in it. So, you must have the sense of seeing challenges as opportunities. You have to have the capacity to create a product that is a solution to the challenge that you have just seen, packaging in such a way that is directed to a particular market and they must be willing to pay for it. But lastly, the price point that helps your business sustainable for growth, so you can innovate, but that doesn’t make you an interpreneur. You can innovate, invent, create, but the ability to find the customer who is going to pay consistently for it, that is what makes you an entrepreneur. So you need to come out today and say to yourself “I have invented, I have created. That is not sufficient. I need to find the market, I need to find the people and I need to pu the price that they are willing to pay for it consistently, such that I can have sustained growth and that growth must of necessity be profitable. So, if we’re going to create solutions, lets think of packaging the solutions in a good way.
So. I would like to use this opportunity to share stories of innovation that house of Tara has experienced. We have many Innovations. When you heard my profile you heard a lot of first, first, first…I think we are very lucky to have Innovation as a part of our business, and one of the stories I remembered when I think about Innovation is the summer of 1998. Some people may mandate, maybe or maybe not, but I think it has done a revolutionary work. So, the summer of 1998, a very prominent Nigerian man’s daughter was getting married and the daughter wanted this magical wedding, she wanted to get a beautiful dress, she wanted to be able walk into the auditorium where her white wedding was going to take place and know confidently that she looks stunning and that the man who she was going to be married to would look at her and say “Yes this is truly the bone of my bone and the flesh of my flesh, and she thought about the different images of what she wanted to see, a dress, nice hair, make up, just perfectly groomed, but there was a challenge, and the challenge was “Who was the person that could help her present herself in such a way from a Make-Up stand point that she would be confident in herself.”
“At this time, it was just aunties that would apply red lipstick for you when you are getting married. And if you were here 25 years ago or you got married before that time, you will know that there were no Make-Up artists in Nigeria. But on the other side of town, there was a young Law undergraduate who had this skill of helping her classmates who were going for law dinners and say to them “I can help you do your Make-Up” and they were not paying really for it, but she enjoyed the feeling she got from transforming these ladies and these ladies looked forward to it consistently. Soon enough a friend said “Why don’t you start this thing as a business and the question was: is everything a business? Well…This was potentially a business, but she went about her classmates to say “Do you know anyone who is getting married? Do you have a sister who is getting married? Do you have a cousin who is getting married? Can you tell them that there is now a Make-Up artist in town. And soon enough, our prominent man’s daughter and the undergraduates paths collided; one hand had a challenge, on the other side of town a young undergraduate had created a solution that had been packaged into a product that she knew could be priced properly and she was ready for an exchange to take place because she knew that somebody had found value in it. Their paths collided and as they say, it was a marriage made in heaven.”
“That young entrepreneur is standing here today and has built a Beauty business 25 years from that seed. But it is not enough that she has now built a business, it’s the ripple effect of the decision and the courage to take that step, it is the number of Make-Up artists that we have today and industry that prior didn’t exist, the number of product lines that have been created, locally by local brands that was not the case in the past was simply because that young undergraduate dared to innovate and this is what management science calls “Breakthrough innovation.” When you do something that has never been done before, have the courage to do, charge for it, get paid for it, and then price properly so that you can have a business that is sustainable many years after.”
I’ll tell another story, another moment of innovation, a part from the Bridal Make-up one. I don’t know how many of us remember when you go to the market with your mother and you remember the in convenience, the crowd, the heat, the negotiations back and forth, how tired you get, but I think the worse part is the traders and the cosmetic sellers that drag you as the daughter, as you’re walking what will they be doing “Madam, I go marry your pikin ooo, your daughter fine o, she is so beautiful, I go marry am”. And guess what, mothers are crying, the daughters are cringing, I’m sure if you are a man you didn’t have the experience or your sisters told you of the experience. It is a terrible experience, and so the women wants to continue to buy because grooming is a huge part of who we are as women, so Make-Up, putting on your eye pencil, lipstick and looking snazy is part of being a woman, its Part of being your feminine self, the same way men have to cut their hair and that’s how they feel groomed.
That is how important Make-Up is for us. But the women are stuck with buying from the open traditional market.
But soon enough, yet again, a group of professionals, that as the business began to grow I had to engage, and in engaging, what I found is that the entrepreneurs came with their own ideas. One of the ideas was for us to start up something and what was that something? What we call a “Make Up Specialist store”. What that meant was we wanted to provide comfort, convenience, customer engagement, customer service, so that the women who wanted to buy Make Up were not stuck in buying in the open market anymore. And in 2004, we opened our very first Make Up studio in Nigeria, a speciality store just for Make Up. And was not just that we were retailing products, it was that only professional Make Up artists were attending to customers. So we’re no longer stuck with one random trader who doesn’t know what Tones are, what Shades are, what Colours suits who But now we’ having trained Make Up artists and by extension, we had to now create a Make Up Academy where we were training Make Up artists who could serve and work in our stores. But then could susbequently go out and become their own enterpreneurs. Today, there are so many international brands in Nigeria that are functioning and can only function simply because (i) the number of Make Up artists that have been trained are able to work in the industry and work in these grounds because we were innovative enough to create a Make-Up speciality store and also create an Academy that develops and trains the Make Up artists who can then become professionals working in these stores, a new career path was created, so you have lawyers who become Make Up artists, you have people studying Engineering who become Make Up artists because they are following their passion. Yes, I love the fact that they is studied this and that and transformed their lives, and created a new pathway for themselves and this is what we call “Experiencial innovation”. So, you may not recreate what already existed, but you may say “How do we make it nice for the customer, how do we make it easier for the customer? How do we make it comfortable, more convenient for the customer. And how do we create a situation where the customer comes in, they walk away with the feeling saying this is exactly where they should be ? That is called Innovation.
Last story I would like to share is the story of our very first franchise, in 2007 we opened our first franchise and at the time we had just opened two stores. We had two in Lagos, one in Ikeja and one in Victoria Island, a young man walked into the office and had the opportunity of meeting one of the entrepreneurs in House of Tara, and that enterpreneur was our general manager who had just come from LBS was working for the company for about a year. When this man came from Ibadan to say “I want a House of Tara Franchise”, 1 for a split second had imposter-syndrome. You know when you’re thinking “does he even know what franchise means? He probably doesn’t know what franchise means, because if he knows what franchise means, it means that he wants to take my brand name and take it to another location, why would he want to do that? Why can’t he start his? Of course the intrapreneur who understands that this is a brand that can, because it’s a recognisable brand, it has value, that if you post it on a door as a signage, people already know what it means and they’ll come. He took his time to explain it to the enterpreneur who didn’t get it, Interpreneurs, you’re powerful. He sold the idea to me, that was how, we created the first franchise store outside of Lagos. But the minute that happened, what he also said to me, it gave me the idea that we could open 50 stores, 100 stores. It is possible as long as the government, creates an enabling environment. They was a time I even thought of opening a thousand stores, well than that’s a conversation for another day.
Now, soon after the Ibadan franchise was opened, we got another franchise from Port Harcourt, in the first year, she opened in Port Harcourt. She decided she wanted to open a second franchise. So, here we had one in Ibadan, two in Port Harcourt and then I said “you know what let’s go, how far? and in one year, we opened 10 Stores because there was a gap, there was a challenge, innovation came to the rescue and when innovation came to the rescue we saw growth, and that growth is not just for that time, it has been sustained till now, and it is what we see in that industry today.
And what I’ll like to say in closing, let’s look at 1 Corinthians Chapter 2 verse 9 that says “Eyes have not seen, ears have not heard and it hasn’t enter into the heart of man, those things which are prepared for those who love the Lord”.
What that means is that there is something in the inside of you that is Innovation. The bible says there is a spirit in man and the inspiration of the almighty gives him insight. Insights is the prerequisite for Innovation. There’s some kind of intelligence, spiritual intelligence that we have when we pray in the spirits. And the more we pray in the spirit and we listen in and we tune into air spirit man, things are dropped, witty inventions are dropped and as long as you’re the person of the spirit it will come to you, so when you’re praying in the spirit, make sure to take the time to take notes, take your book and your paper, you’re almost saying to God “I am coming expectant of insights, and because I have the holy ghost on the inside of me, this insight has capacity to innovate. So, I may not see, but I may have some data, we have the capacity to got some spiritual data. And the gift of the spirit we all operate in, has the capacity to sow those things into us.
Lets not wait for the world to teach us Innovation, lets teach the world Innovation.
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