The last two year has not been easy to navigate for anyone. COVID-19 blew across the world with a vengeance that spared few. While its origins are at best murky, the world’s best minds believe it started circulating around December 2019 and hit its stride around Feb/March, 2020. Unbeknownst to me, this was also the period when I started thinking earnestly about creating a consumer brand to help Raintree Farms balance out its commodity exports of moringa powder.
Up ’til then, we had one product and one major export customer and one major product. Anyone and their grandmother would tell you this is a terrible recipe for a successful business. In fact, it was an excellent recipe for how to design a failing business.
Even worse, we were in a terrible position of trying to manufacture a highly sensitive food product without the proper investment in the infrastructure required to make said commodity that met international standards. To say the least, this fact kept me awake most of 2019.
There’s a kind of panic that sets in after you raise a significant round of investment. You immediately start worrying about the collapse of your business and how you’re going to pay back your investors. The worries when you’re in agriculture and you have to deal with elements you can’t control, even if you wanted to. Commercial Agriculture in Africa (as an African) is not for the faint of heart.
Right on queue, after closing our seed round in November, 2018, we stalled out in 5-month drought. Which was then followed by 6 months of heavy rains in 2019. In the middle of that our major client called for a pause on deliveries. If our investor wasn’t panicked about the drought or the heavy rains and flooding, they were very panicked by our major client calling a pause on deliveries.
Long story short, I needed to rebalance the business’ revenue streams and that meant kicking my long dormant desire to create a premium moringa beauty brand into high gear. I’d started looking into packaging for our moringa oil as a side hobby as far back as 2017, cruising Pinterest and Alibaba looking for interesting containers that would really help the oil to shine. Below are some of the early iterations of the packaging:
I knew we couldn’t wait to perfect everything before launch, so even without a perfect logo, I ordered the first batch of 500 bottles to start rolling out into the market while I worked to improve the branding. The first bottles arrived in December, 2019. Our strategy: launch early, iterate and improve as you go (also listen to customer feedback). We didn’t even have a proper production line. I was literally filling the bottles myself in the office whenever I had some free time.
In January 2020, we opened a pop-up store at Acacia Mall, our first public introduction of the product. Little did we know that in a few short weeks the world would start shutting down. This mall wouldn’t see normal traffic again for nearly a year. Customers responded positively and sales started picking up. We moved fulfillment to the farm in Masindi.
Customers were already starting to ask “what else do you have?”
I’d started thinking about soap production as far back as 2016. So when customers started asking “what else do you have?”, I went back to review what we’d created. The bars were crude and uninviting, but the product had promise.
By March, 2020, Uganda entered its first lockdown. The factory shut down and I was stuck in my Kampala apartment since cross-country travel was banned. I connected with an artisanal soap producer in Kampala to finish the work on our first moringa-based soap bars. After a few months of development, the first three bars launched in September, 2020. We were still in rolling lockdowns with curfews and limited movement. Most of our sales (over 90%) were from our Instagram DMs. Instagram ads really kept sales coming in and boda bodas (motorcycle taxis) helped deliver orders to customers who were stuck at home.
One by one, our customer base started growing.
I finished designing the brand sometime in June/July 2020, right at the launch of our Shopify website. The logo mark was inspired by the very expressive Moringa oleifera flower. The flower mark really represented what the brand was about: clean, natural beauty products made from Moringa oleifera, sheabutter, and other indigenous ingredients. Since ALL of our products include moringa oil as an ingredient, the flower perfectly represented the origin of our products. Without the flower, you can’t have seeds. And without the seeds, you can’t have moringa oil. And so on.
I finished the design process to unify the product packaging in 2021. The color scheme featured a neutral gray/black with a lime green accent and white. The vision was to create a brand that forced Ugandans to look twice when they realized it was designed and manufactured in Uganda. There’s a certain “look” to Ugandan products on the shelf in pharmacies. It’s easy to identify wether the product is local or imported. That “look” is more often a result of sophisticated packaging options to differentiate brands. So you end up with multiple brands using the same green and white plastic containers with badly designed stickers.
To achieve the sense of “wow,” I knew I needed to import the packaging. The bottle we chose for the oil, for example, is a tubeless vacuum pump that doesn’t use an inner plastic tube. Oh, the joy of explaining how a vacuum pump works when customers would call us furious that we didn’t include the inner tube and that the product was defective. Only to have their jaws drop when we explain how it functions. That sense of “wow” is really hard to produce with Ugandan packaging manufacturers without a lengthy, expensive process of trial and error. We didn’t have the financial muscle or mandate to go that route, so China it was.
Without a lot of capital to work with (remember, COVID-19 lockdown everything, including our bank account), I knew Europe was also out as a supplier. Chinese manufacturers hit the sweet spot between affordability and high quality production and printing. Without Alibaba, there was no way I would have been able to “keyboard shop” and compare different manufacturers.
As an aside, Africa needs its own version of Alibaba featuring all the domestic manufacturers on the continent. But we’re a long way from that reality. We need to first implement the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) before such a feature would be profitable.
After identifying the Chinese manufacturer that we wanted to work with, we went through a months-long process of getting printed samples. I’d tweak a design and email it to the manufacturer. They would process the prototypes and send them back in about 3-4 weeks and we’d repeat the process until we were satisfied with the quality. You build trusted relationship through this process and I am now “virtual friends” with several of the manufacturing reps.
For each product, the entire design process can took anywhere from 90 days (if we executed really well and the logistics gods were on our side), to over 9 months when global logistics ground to a halt due to COVID-19 disruptions. One of our factories was located in Wuhan, so there was a 90-day period where we couldn’t do anything except sit on our hands and wait because the whole REGION was shut down. We ran out of bottle packaging frequently in 2020 and 2021. This process made me appreciate Apple’s multi-year process of bringing iPhones to market at such a large global scale every single year!
Meanwhile, we created 2 more cleansing bars to bring the total of different soaps to five. We also brought production of the soaps in-house. We trained a dedicated staff to manufacture our custom formulations. After two weeks of trial and error, the team was up to speed and comfortable with the production process.
In early 2020, our growth was severely curtailed as the government of Uganda shut down Facebook over political squabbling. That meant small brands that were using the platform to attract new customers were now stuck. It didn’t help that Facebook required Instagram ads to run through its main Facebook platform. This meant we were unable to advertise—even with a VPN installed. The VPN made it impossible to access our ad account because the security settings suspended the account due to “suspicious” activity caused by the VPN. So that meant we were (and are, still) stuck.
Social advertising meant we could attract new customers with a relatively small budget. $10 per day generated anywhere from $50-150 in sales daily. Traditional advertising like radio and TV would have required several hundred dollars per week and weren’t as effective. More of our customer base were on social media than were listened to radio or watched TV (in Uganda). So reaching them was going to be more difficult.
The solution was to bring the product closer to where they were. Throughout 2021, we added over 10 retail partners in Kampala. But KLA is a phenomenally small market. There was only so much growth we could achieve. We needed to expand. The fastest way to do that was to explore new markets abroad.
Shipping from Uganda to international customers proved expensive and prohibitive – sometimes the shipping cost more than the product itself. Kenya, for example, was charging more than the cost of the product in customs duties and import taxes. This was on top of the expensive shipping rates from DHL.
The first market we wanted to reach was the US. That meant establishing a legal presence in the country. Thanks to the ease of virtual incorporation, we were able to setup a legal entity incorporated in Delaware in less than a week.
One thing I realized fairly quickly in our early attempt to have a global presence with a e-commerce site is that Ugandans don’t purchase things online in the traditional sense. Much of the country is cash-based, the use of credit and debit cards to purchase things online is limited to a very tiny segment of the market. Ugandans would rather come to your website and use the chatbot to order and pay on delivery than enter credit card details.
Worse yet, the infrastructure for credit card processing is quite janky at best. Flutterwave integration to process credit cards is as good an experience as you’ll have. And that’s a high compliment for their near hostile implementation process and atrocious UX.
The best credit card processing integrations still required a “developed country” legal presence. All this to explain why switching the website to be US based made for a much better checkout experience because we could take advantage of Shopify’s native, seamless payment process. Further, a native US presence meant we could take advantage of the fast growing social commerce features rolling out at Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Apple’s iMessage.
With the website setup, now we needed fulfillment. This meant we needed to integrate a third-party US warehouse and fulfillment partner. When you think about fulfillment, the first thing that usually comes to mind are Amazon’s robot-staffed, conveyor belt mega complexes. There are actually a litany of small third-party fulfillment services small brands can use to manage customer delivery. We found one easily through one of our customers. Personal recommendations are key to finding a good one.
With the sales infrastructure in the US set up, we now needed to scale production and deliver products to said warehouse. And this is the part I have to pause and breath into a paper bag because, wow! is global logistics a nightmare in the age of COVID!
Producing for one tiny market is one thing, attempting to produce for a global audience introduces a whole host of interrelated dynamics that have to play out either sequentially or simultaneously or sometimes even both. It gets worse when partners in the chain exhibit abject incompetence at their ONE job.
To give you a sense of what we had to deal with, here’s a simple illustration:
First, it’s important to state that, yes, there are 100s of ways to set up your global logistics and this is by far not an illustration of how you should do it, rather an illustration of what works for us currently due to many, many circumstances that forced our hand. In hindsight, there is certainly things that we could have done differently to smooth out the process, but sometimes, some lessons you only learn the hard way. However much you prepare, you won’t know wether a decision you made is the right one until you try. If it fails, don’t dwell on it too much. Take the “L” and pivot to a new strategy as soon as possible. Mistakes will happen in business decisions. This isn’t fatal. Dwelling too long on missed opportunities can kill you. You don’t get that time back.
Second, the aforementioned packaging design and production process above needed to scale from 500-piece production run per product to 5000-piece production run PER product. Whereas you can ship 500 pieces via airfreight, unless you’re Apple and can charter your own flights, air freighting this much packaging can put you out of business before you even start. So that meant we had to ship everything by sea. Which in turn meant our lead times went from weeks to months. This is even before calculating the delays at Uganda customs.
If you’re planning on expanding your market presence as a Ugandan company, beware of URA/Customs. There are separate taxes if you’re importing packaging for domestic product sales, vs the products you plan on exporting. If there’s anything you can take from this post is make sure that your export products are labeled “FOR EXPORT ONLY”. This helps you avoid import taxes and duties. I actually commend Uganda Investment Authority and URA for this carve out. This allows Ugandan companies to get high quality packaging for their retail products without increasing their cost of production. However, do make sure said packaging is actually exported. You invite unnecessary tax headaches if the same products are found on the domestic market.
So your design process has to include packaging designed specifically for external markets and domestic markets.
Finally, choosing the right carrier partner can make or break your global expansion. For me, this was one of those decisions I wish I could take back. Logistics providers (even international ones) in Uganda have a hit or miss track record. From Uganda Post, to air freight partners, and all the way to DHL, we’ve tried them all. I’d say the worst one so far is FedEx. Our first shipment to our US warehouse finally went out before Christmas, with the expectation that the consignment would arrive by New Years Eve. This post is being published in at the start of the second week of February and some of the boxes hadn’t yet arrived at the warehouse. To give you a sense of the absurdity, some of the boxes were randomly sent BACK to Uganda before being resent back to the warehouse. The lesson I learned was don’t make decisions purely based on price. While you might save up front by dollar value, you pay for it in lost time and frustration dealing with carrier incompetence. At one time they literally told us “we have no idea where your packages are”. This from a company who’s singular business model is delivering packages. Cutting corners can be extremely expensive. Pay for the peace of mind. In this case, I should have stuck with DHL until another option came about.
As of today, the early pieces of our global expansion are in place. Now comes the tough bit. Selling. North America is a tough market to crack and it takes a long time to crack, but it’s worth it if you can combine a compelling brand with the right messaging that can attract customers.
In this regard, we chose to use a select group of influencers who received our custom-made influencer kits that included all of our products for them to try out and review.
To conclude, I wrote this post as a way of documenting how far we’ve come and all the issues we’ve run through. I feel that documenting your journey from time to time is extremely important as a founder. Often we get bogged down either with the overwhelming challenge of starting something or the joy of success that we forget that we built our journey largely from learning from others who already conquered the pathways we use to achieve our dreams. So in a way, this is paying it forward. Someone out there will find this a valuable resource when launching their product in the market and avoid some of the mistakes we’ve made or use this as a perfect blue-print for this launch. So, go forth and launch that product you’ve always wanted to create.
