Oguntoyinbo Olayinka is a 23-year-old business owner and chief executive officer of Spiffy Royale, an online female fashion store. She is also a personal shopper and teaches people how to import goods into Nigeria as well as how to start businesses.
She describes her business as an avenue to help women become more confident in their appearance as well as relive the burden of shopping for good and quality outfits. She explains that her business name ‘Spiffy’ means ‘smart in appearance’ while ‘Royale’ implies ‘royalty’. Both showcase that her business is about presenting women as queens, she says.
She started this business in 2018 during her fourth year in school. Although now a graduate of Zoology with a major in Parasitology, she has continued her business and has expanded it to include product import and retail marketing.
Yinka was inspired to start this business due to her love for shopping as well as her passion for dressing people up. She states that “although this was one of my hobbies initially, but I realised I could make money from it as well.”
Furthermore, she has always been interested in becoming a business owner, so when the opportunity came, she grabbed it with both hands.
She started her business with N50,000, which she got from her mother as loan. The young entrepreneur is frugal in her spending and has been able to grow her business to a great height. Currently, she gets her products by importing them from China, USA, Turkey and other European countries.
Speaking on her expansion plans, she says, “I am working on getting a physical space for my business and also get employees to make the workload easier.”
“I intend to incorporate logistics to ease the delivery process of my business as well as expand the products I import into the country.” Yinka adds.
In fact, she intends to register her business duly as well as gather certifications to validate it.
The young entrepreneur affirms that she attends trainings whenever the opportunity presents itself as she intends to become a trailblazer in the business world. ‘Yinka gets involved in lots of self-development activities too.
She discloses that although she has competitors, she offers her services with incentives that attract customers and keep them coming back, highlighting that “Every of my items comes with free gift and I match quality with affordability.”
As interesting as her business is, she says that she encounters various challenges such as difficulty in gaining customer’s trust, infrastructure deficit that causes logistics challenges, and poor access to loans for business expansion, among others.
She requests that government should make the import duty favourable and as well address the infrastructure deficit problem in order to reduce its effect on the transport sector of the country.
Yinka affirms that she is inspired by successful people and is working towards becoming one. Advising other entrepreneurs, she says, “Don’t be scared of losing, you might not get it right initially but eventually it will work out.”
Gbemi Faminu
