FashionCity

'Coursera' for premium fashion education.

The Poised Patternmaker Academy is an online fashion training school that offers short but intensive fashion courses to fashion professionals who desire to improve their skills. 

We currently run affordable trainings on WhatsApp and post free tutorials on YouTube and Facebook.
We started our online trainings in response to the problems we had observed around us and on a popular Facebook Nigerian fashion group. 
We noticed most fashion professionals in that group had basic skills and most couldn't afford to attend a good fashion school as they were expensive($250 monthly). 

Data from the Nigerian Creative mapping report carried out in Lagos in 2013 by the British Council Nigeria gives credence to the observation that about 70% of fashion professionals surveyed had basic skills, 4% had intermediate skills, and only a handful, 24% had advance skills.
This is a huge problem as advance skills simply means an increase in the number of jobs a creative can get, it also means more opportunities to make more money and scale up their businesses. Nigerian fashion businesses struggle to recruit highly skilled staff. Most businesses have to train continuously and there is also the possibility of trained staff leaving to either start their own businesses or for a bigger fashion house. There are numerous cases of poaching of tailors by fellow designers 
Its already a norm for fashion designers to look across the borders especially tailors and machinists from Senegal, Togo and Cote d'Ivoire as they are already trained and extremely skilled.
The present solutions are physical fashion schools. There are very good fashion schools in Nigeria with great educational structures, but they are just a handful and these schools are located mostly in commercial cities like Lagos, Abuja and Ibadan. The other alternative which seems to be the most popular choice among low income earning fashion professionals is the traditional apprenticeship system that involves experienced professionals using their shops as schools in teaching newbies or fashion creatives who want to improve their skills. This system is fraught with serious problems as its a common observance to see most trainers turn their interns to domestic helps insisting on them carrying out chores unrelated to fashion training. Secondly, they mostly don't have structured course outlines and they heavily extort the interns financially in the guise of graduation/freedom.

We believe technology has the ability to reach more people worldwide and so in order to scale up our business while protecting our content, we intend to develop an E learning website and App called 'FashionCity' where video and pictorial trainings on numerous fashion and art topics can be accessed by any one, anywhere in the world at an affordable subscription rate of $10.

There will be skill levels from beginners to advance and each skill level has 10 videos and can be watched offline for 30 days.
We intend for everyone in the world to have easy access to premium fashion education at an affordable rate of $10. 

FashionCity is anew application leveraging on an existing technology to offer our innovative training videos.

FashionCity basically would be an E-learning fashion training website and mobile app that seeks to improve the skills of fashion professionals, enthusiasts and large fashion organisation with employees by offering easy accessibility and convenience in acquiring premium fashion education while working. 

Technology enables us provide these high content videos and step by step pictorial illustrations (created by popular fashion professionals) online and offline for 30 days once downloaded to users. 

We intend to create huge awareness and marketing of the app among our 3 customers segments. For individual users, we intend to carry out mass trainings in select universities.

For fashion professionals, we intend to engage them through offline trainings in partnership with fashion associations and government skill centers.

We also intend to sponsor select users to showcase for free at recognized art and fashion exhibitions.

Our vision in 5 years is to have trained 1 million low income earning fashion professionals with more focus on women.

We intend to organize free monthly trainings in regions ( north,West,East and south) reaching more people who have no access to smartphones.

We also intend to secure a partnership with a telecom that would enable us reach more offline customers, especially those with feature phone. our aim would be to introduce short code message that enable them get training videos they can watch and also get information about periodic offline trainings

For the middle class demography, we intend to carry out digital marketing to attract them. We also intend to partner with local and regional fashion and art associations with larger reach.

For the low income demography,  we intend to create strong offline communities all around the rural areas. In these communities, we will continously offer physical trainings and help install the apps on there phones for the free version.

We have trained 10 women on our WhatsApp platform and over 1000 on Facebook.

Running trainings on WhatsApp provides us with a video compressible platform that makes it possible to get heavy videos across. The only problem is that my downloadable videos can be used by anyone and I want to have more control over its access.

We have a followership of about 500 people on our social media platforms and we keep growing everyday as we constantly offer free and paid trainings on these platforms

With a huge market size of 1.3 million, our break even volume is 10,000 users as we see huge potentials among the numerous fashion professionals in Nigeria.

We intend to offer free and paid trainings on the FashionCity App.

We also intend to organise more offline trainings to reach more offline customers. We believe with the monthly offline trainings, participants will have increased skillsets that can bring more income for themelves.

For the online trainings, we believe students will go through all the skill levels from beginners to advance, and become highly proficient in these courses and learn other topics.

I am a dressmaker by profession and I have about 3 years experience in fashion retail and production. I have a huge network of fashion professionals I can partner and work with on this project.

I also have about a 1 year experience working in an Elementary school as a history teacher/ assistant class teacher.

I have within my disposal individuals who are highly skilled in videography and  video editing, graphics design, website/app development, marketers and content creators(partners who will create the different topical video trainings).

Our revenue model is based on charging a subscription fee of 3500 Naira/$10 per each skill level. Each of the levels (beginners, intermediate and advance) of each topic are priced at $10.

Our second revenue model is from selling art and fashion supplies on our marketplace called the ResourceHub. Each video has a downloadable resource guide that  has links to the resource hub. Users who buy their supplies using the links get them at affordable prices and have their supplies customised and sent to their doorsteps.

We believe we can reach a huge number of users as smartphone penetration is high with a lot of Nigerians possessing smartphones less than $100. Data subscription is very low as telecoms compete with each other to give low mouth watering data prices.

According to Google consumer barometer, more than 30% of Nigerians enjoy watching long videos of more than 3 mins and this figure is growing every year.

I believe with Solve, FashionCity will get much needed mentorship from experienced mentors and coaches. It would be an amazing opportunity to network with other visionary entrepreneurs from all around the world,learning how they have created their solutions to problems.

It would also be a great opportunity to work from MIT hot spots ,glean from the numerous resources available. This would get us much needed brand awareness that would enable us reach more users

The major help I need with the FashionCity App is understanding the technical aspects of building an app with compressed videos that would take less time and data to download. Help with understanding how to reach more offline customers who might not have smartphones but normal feature phones and how to efficiently partner with telecoms . I would also love to help with scaling the business.