Tailorgang

With Africa’s population projected to add over 1.5b people in less than 40 years from now; Africa’s fragile economy growing at an average rate of 4.6% annually cannot sustain this huge population growth especially creating jobs and opportunities for small fashion businesses.

Tailorgang offers online and offline business tools focused on learning, starting, managing and scaling a fashion business including access to reach African population home and abroad. Creating an African market place that will help thousands of small fashion businesses on the continent to be economically stable and widen the job market.

The story behind Africa’s fashion crosses the complex designs of the continent’s culture, heritage, and her dress. The next big thing is to provide a solution to the potential of Africa to drive the future of Africa and slow economic growth due to rising youth unemployment and increased value of commodities. Africa's talented fashion designers spring up on a daily basis, facing the enormous challenges of growing and scaling a business on the continent; so many of them with few or no access to digital learning tools, available market, finances and human resources to scale a clothing business. Even with these imploding figures, the continent still ranks as the highest importer of clothing and apparels, making it so difficult for small fashion business to scale on the continent. 

In Nigeria alone, there are over 2m youths who have gone into fashion design and tailoring alone within the past two years, we project another 5m youths in the next 3 years. Two years ago, we started researching how some small Tailors worked so hard to double their earnings using Tailors in Lagos, Abuja and Calabar, all in Nigeria. We realised an informal market built around tools like WhatsApp, we also realised it was so difficult for both customer and tailors as these tools had helped with growth but provided platforms for major scams in Nigeria. Our key findings was the problem these small tailors had with payment, many of them could not sell outside Nigeria, not even to Ghana and other African countries, yet their skills, designs and innovations were needed in America, Canada and Europe. We started learning about these problems and building simple, practical digital tools to help thousands of them scale and make more money.

Tailorgang has provided business tools for learning, starting, scaling and managing small fashion businesses. Our solution help accelerate small fashion ideas and turn them into big brands. We have done this in four ways; 

1.First we have provided an online fashion academy which brings together the collective skills of severally established designers and focused on growing the skills of young starters.

2. We provided a suit of business tools that is focused on helping starters with cheap CRM/ERP solutions which helps them to manage entries, request, customers, invoices, sizes/styles, expenses, staff and above all receive money across Africa and other continent. 

3. We then provided a community, a meeting point for African designers and customers to share and create styles, providing satisfaction to customers and on the other hand providing an economy for Tailors and designers. 

4. Finally, we are pushing African clothes to other continents, our work here involves partnering with several African clothe makers to sell African wears in Europe, Canada and the US, we are currently testing our mobile market place in France.

Tailorgang represents a genuinely new way of starting and running a fashion business, seeking to make it easier for Tailors to meet new customers and transact with them. We are creating a better way of running a modern fashion business, from the learning process, the business solutions and the community, all of these represents a paradigm shift from the regular way that fashion businesses are modelled to run in Africa

Tailorgang offers; Dedicated focused fashion community, Dedicated Learning resources from trusted tutors, Dedicated ERP/CRM tools built to solve your everyday process and work flow and a dedicated market place to attract sales from Africans in diaspora.

Our solutions seeks to make better, stable and skilled Tailors and fashion businesses from Africa, then help them sell their locally made clothes to Africans in diaspora, bringing down the prices of such clothes outside Africa.

Tailorgang will partner with Tailors who show a degree of consistency in serving their clients through the business tools provided, with the clients feedback and ratings; our aim is to provide long term finance and resources to enable such Tailors release clothing lines to be sold abroad. 

Tailorgang uses consumer-facing software for both tailors and customers (web and mobile applications, cloud services).

We use Web technologies; Restful web services with NodeJS and PHP
Version Control System with Github. Database management services with Mongdo DB and Mysql databases. Web application backbone with PHP, HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT AND AJAX. Video hosting and streaming services with Vimeo
Image optimization services with Imagekit, Server security and management with Cloudfare and serverpilot
Web hosting services from Host1plus and Linode. Tailorgang is built modular and each services (Learning, Discovering Tailors, Managing a business, and buying) all segmented to allow scaling and clarity. 

Our solution addresses most of the problems associated with starting and scaling a fashion business in Nigeria and Africa. First the learning process is designed to help intending fashion designers learn at their own pace and from verified tutors and designers. The business tools allow starting Tailors to create business profiles and link their bank accounts, allowing them to manage customers, invoices, expenses and income; something that most small business on the continent do not do, most especially Tailors. 

We expect to lift thousands of Tailors from poverty lines using our approach, we strongly believe that these small businesses have been doing certain things the wrong way and our community will change such culture and build their confidence to achieving more. 

For example during our first six months, we had 18000 downloads on Google play store and 11000 verified users, this feedback made us go back to the drawing board to change our entire approach to solving this problem. The Android app was built to do Learning, Buying, finding Tailors and business tools for tailors, this did not work for us and our users as there was too much to use in one app. That feedback provided us with valuable data to access how perceived that these problems existed and were happy solutions were being provided.

We currently serve over 5000 active users and 4000 active Fashion businesses. In the next one year, we expect that number to quadruple. In five years our aim is to deliver/serve African clothes to over 10m Africans on the continent and 2m Africans living in Canada,Europe and  America. We also expect to have over 800,000 verified fashion businesses trading on our platforms and scaling their business using our technologies. 

This year, our major goal was to move from Calabar, a coastal city with less economic activities in Nigeria to Lagos, a viable market for our solution, putting the resources together to achieve that feet was hectic, but we have already achieved that and our company is moving in June to the city of Lagos from where we plan to scale our solution to other parts of Africa. 

In the next year, we want to partner with every fashion business in Lagos and Ghana, leveraging on their wide experiences to deliver quality lessons and clothes to customers on our platforms. This move will affect so many lives across the continent and change how people start and scale a clothing apparel business. We want to establish more knowledge and financial sharing solutions as this is Africa's biggest problems, we are very close and should be starting off by August. We also want to secure finance for small African businesses, with verifiable data on our platform, designers and Tailors can access small scale loans to help scale faster. 

Over the next five years, we want deepen our research and consolidate our solutions, partnering with several other businesses to push our innovation into Europe and America. We also want to open several Tailorgang centres (stores and fulfilment centres) across Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, London and New York.

Our major barrier is funding, our rent in Lagos cost us $90000 for a 2 years lease period. This puts us under pressure to deliver results even more quickly and to make money to pay for another 2 years or buy the building entirely to secure our position in 5 years. 

Securing partnerships with established fashion businesses has been one very big issue, we lost some funds securing partnerships, some business owners don't believe they need partnerships to make more money, this is a very popular opinion in the fashion industry in Africa, especially in Nigeria. 

Moving to other countries will need some level of cultural and language understanding, the team speaks mostly English and we have to learn new culture and languages or secure partnerships with people who can help us. This will be a problem and barrier now and in 5 years. 

Penetrating Europe and America to push up sales of clothes made in Africa could be a problem, issue with standards of goods and meeting business criteria. 

For funding, we plan to raise funds from our established partner Nugi Technologies to be able to buy off our current building and stop paying rents long term. We also plan to access funding opportunities like this one and many others including taking an African development bank Loan should we meet up with all the requirements. 

Our team is already designing new legal structures to engage already established fashion businesses. We hope that a new approach to meeting and agreeing with Tailors and Designers, being especially open with them will establish trust and take away the fear of loosing established business. 

Solving the problem of cultural and language barrier will require employing staff who can interpret and teach key management members these new ways. We will also be exploiting digital tools that teach new cultures and languages on the long run. 

We are building our in house team on Quality assurance of every clothing/apparel made with the Tailorgang brand name. Our product will have to pass the quality and best practice test of any market we intend to go into.

6 Full-time Software Developers

5 Full time Tailors and Fashion designers

5 Models on Part time

4 Management staff

3 Directors

Our team has a blend of youth and experience. Our Co-founders are leaders in their industries. Sally Ugi and Ugi Augustine; our cofounders are doing very well running a fashion brand and a tech company respectively. Sally is the creative director of Allure by Nugi and Ugi is current CEO of Nugi Technologies. Kingsley is a media guru and currently heads the media team, he has been into media for 10 years and brings in loads of experience. Adaeze is our current CEO, her creative desires to shape the fashion industry in Nigeria endeared her to the board, she brings a lot of youth and energy and has been able to guide the recent progress and move to Lagos. Our dev team is headed by the CTO, Sunday Okoi. Sunday is blessed with over 9 years of experience in software development and has what it takes to drive engineering new products. Finally Ajoke, an experienced marketer with over 8 years of experience is joining us this month. We strongly believe we are guided by believe, passion and experience. We are well positioned to create a unique story. 

We currently partner Nugi Technologies, Allure by Nugi, Penzrah global, and May Dreams Entertainment. 

Nugi Technologies provide the support needed in developing our product.

 Allure by Nugi has consistently provided the guide to develop products that impacts the fashion community, they have also helped with a road map in research and overseen production of clothes and video tutorials.

May Dreams entertainment have been our media partner providing equipment to cover events and production of tutorials.

Penzra Global has also been a partner in the production of classes and clothes. 

We help Tailors connect to customers easily and quickly and provide business tools to help them manage all the chain processes involved in delivering quality clothes including (customer management, order processing, sizes management, invoices, quotations, brand management and visibility, track taxes, expenses, earnings, profit and losses). We also provide payment system for Tailors to receive money from clients abroad and allow Tailors to transfer this funds within the Tailorgang community of tailors enabling very small transactions that don't attract fees. 

On the other hand, Tailorgang is building a community of African's best tailors and helping customers find them easily and do business with them, also providing a feedback and ratings mechanism.

We bill Tailors $12/month and $100/year for all our business tools. Instead of billing them for selling in our store, we negotiate a model with every tailor, we do as low as $0.5 per item sold through our store, all their sales come into their digital wallets, we settle with each tailor when they request for their money.

Intending Tailors who want to join our online academy are billed $100 per year and are given quality online classes through out the year through our organisation and partnerships with other academy. We also partner with Tailors to sell their own classes which we earn 30% from every class sold through us.

We are operating lean and getting investments from our partner company including IT support. We also plan to raise some more capital from investors while we give our product time to be appreciated by our target market. Tailors are signing up free for business tools, our strategy is to allow them appreciate every feature until 1st Jan 2020. In the interim, we begin sales of content in our academy by July; this will help us get day to day funding of operations in the short term. 

Our major aim of applying to solve is to get visibility across Africa and globally and to connect to investors and people who could help us with marketing and advertising. 

It is so difficult to scale out of our city in calabar, no startup scaled from there so far, we have successfully moved from Calabar to Lagos and we hope solve can help us with visibility to both our potential users and investors, provide us a network to leverage on and expand our dreams of establishing the best informal sector driven technology for the fashion ecosystem in Africa. 

For us, just attending the solve event and the opportunity to connect with others will mean a lot for our growth. 

We want to partner global Fashion brands and schools to help us build curriculum and content for our academy solution aimed at reaching over 5m new Tailors by 2021. 

We will also like to partner organisations like Google and Microsoft to help us integrate artificial intelligence using azure and Google cloud.

We already started building artificial intelligence to help us analyse distributed sizes for clothes across Africa, our research is starting from Lagos and will help us predict sizes of customers accurately from two pictures. The data will help both our own tailors and vendors to make clothes that accurately fit. This data will also help other fashion companies making clothes in Africa with time. So if we win this prize, we will like to invest it towards ensuring that we release this update earlier than schedule in 2020. 

Even though our solution is for everyone; the fashion communities we have studied to develop our solutions were majorly women based! Women can drive our solutions especially the sewing communities on Facebook. Women are running majority of fashion businesses in Africa and our solution is opening up new opportunities for funding small starters who are majorly women. For example we discussed our academy and crowdfunding platform with several women based groups and they liked the idea of being able to raise funds within our solution and using those funds to start a business. This is already what they do in their small WhatsApp and Facebook groups but they get to pay bank fees and charges assuming they wanted to contribute $1 dollar to the growth of a business owned by one of them. Our solution provides a simple wallets based on currencies of these women groups, money can be shared and sent across without charges allowing more people to contribute. Winning the prize will help us scale our solutions across several woman groups in Africa and improve their business, leveraging on us to grow economically.