United Kingdom-based Nigerian entrepreneur and boutique owner, Anne Namgbeh has described the journey to the height her fashion business reached today as being tough and eventful.

Anne Namgbeh, who is fondly called Anne ATS, is the owner of ATS Hair and ATS Boutique. According to the Business Management graduate of De Montfort University, Leicester, UK, it was tough for her to decide to go fully into the business, but she is happy today that taking that tough decision has helped her.

“As an entrepreneur, one of my toughest decision was quitting my job. Quitting a job is hard because first, you have to think about how you’re going to tell your boss you’re quitting. Quitting was particularly tough for me because I loved my job and that job paid my bills.

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“Also I didn’t know what challenges were ahead of me but I believed in my dream and that made it somewhat easy for me. I knew in order to be successful I had to make some if not many sacrifices and quitting my job was one of the sacrifices I had to make,” she said.

After making the decision to quit her job, Anne Namgbeh said of the predicament she faced again, “Funding the business was another tough process because we didn’t make a profit for the first six months. Getting my products into the market was not as hard because, at the time, there were not many social media so I targeted universities and shopping malls. I would go to universities and malls to distribute my business cards and then I got referrals from there.”

On how she was able to overcome most of the early-stage challenges she encountered in the business, Anne ATS said: “There will always be challenges, but I don’t let them get to me. Instead, I think about strategies to work around it. To stay afloat, I make sure to keep producing quality products with not so high price tags and also do promotions every often.”

Anne ATS revealed that she got most of her products from China and how did she get these products, she has this to say: “I don’t take part in the production of my products as this happens in China. I just send my manufacturers the design, style, grade, and colour I want and then they make samples and if I’m happy with it, they go ahead with the production otherwise we make changes if needed.”

Speaking on how she got motivated into the fashion business, Anne ATS disclosed that, “I was motivated to go into hair and clothing business because whenever I dressed up, people usually asked me where I got my outfit or hair from and I would give them the name of the stores. But one day I decided instead of advertising for these businesses free of charge, I can open my own company, wear my own clothes and advertise my own brand.

“My mother also played a significant role as she inspired me a lot because she is a hard-working woman. She singlehandedly raised seven children whilst running her little business so that for me is a definition of a strong woman. Running a business is hard and staying in business is harder, I know I’ve met beyond my expectations because I’ve run these businesses now for years and that can only happen if you’re doing something right. “

As a woman entrepreneur, Anne ATS’s philosophy of doing business and life is, “Be yourself and have confidence in who you are. That’s my philosophy. I made it to where I am through hard work and perseverance, but most importantly, I’m there. So I won’t conform myself to a man’s idea of what a leader should look like.”