By Ebele Orakpo

Mr. Joseph Chijioke Obigbara a.k.a Joe Bling, is the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Lagos-based Jeans Factory, a fashion outfit. The graduate of Public Administration from the Anambra State Polytechnic worked briefly in the banking sector as a marketer before veering into fashion business. He spoke to Financial Vanguard recently on his business, the challenges and his dreams for the business.

Excerpts:

Banking to fashion:

I do what I do because of the passion. I have always been a fashion person right from the age of five. As a matter of fact, I became a model in my school. My father was a fashion designer; I suppose I inherited that from him.

*Mr. Joseph Obigbara…This is my dream and it is something I expect my children and grandchildren to live on even after I am gone

Living your dream is not  easy because sometimes, people want you to go in a different direction. I am a graduate and I was expected to be in paid employment. Although I worked in the bank briefly but I decided to follow my passion which is clothing. Right now, I am retailing clothes for other brands but my aim is to have a clothing line which happens to be the name of my business, Jeans Factory.

Why Jeans Factory?

Jeans Factory is a brand name. I love jeans and casual wears generally. If you go to the streets, you will find out that a lot of people wear jeans; 80 out of 100 people on the street wear jeans and that is because very few people have white-collar jobs and dress corporately so I saw it as an opportunity. That was why I dived into that line of clothing.

Now, it does not mean that we deal in jeans only. We also sell other things like T-shirts, tops, shoes etc for both ladies and men, all branded Jeans Factory; it’s a vision which I believe, will grow with time. So the essence is to take advantage of the disadvantage we have here  since very few people wear corporate outfit.

Casual  wears are not only cheap, they are things you want to wear anytime, you feel free and smart in them without having to look for electricity to iron them. So very soon, you will see clothes with that brand name. This is my dream and it is something I expect my children and grandchildren to live on even after I am gone.

Initial cost:

I started the business with five shirts only. I came to Lagos on holiday and a friend of mine said instead of just sitting doing nothing, I should try my hands on something. I collected five shirts and that kind of sparked off the dream of a boutique. That is why I said it is a vision, it grows. I have always liked clothing and looking good so I took the shirts and sold them easily. That was how I started and here I am today! All I needed was that friend of mine who gave me a few shirts and it sparked off the vision. From there, I met a few people who also supported me.

Challenges:

Joseph said paucity of funds is the major challenge facing the business. “Funds play a very vital role in business. Some people say  you don’t need money to do business, I agree to a certain extent but if you have money, it will help you get what you want at a specified price. If you have money, you do not need to beg anyone to give you goods, you get choice goods at your own price because you determine how much you will pay for the goods.

Doing business without funds can be very frustrating. I am talking out of experience. If you have little funds to start, you will go very far and your journey will be very fast unlike someone who doesn’t have funds. I stand to be corrected because I am talking out of my own experience; it might not be someone else’s experience but I believe that money helps you and lack of it can be very frustrating in business.

Trust: I am aware that people just need to trust you with stuff but sometimes they don’t give you choice goods, the kind of goods that sell almost immediately. As a musician, I would say choice goods are like hit songs; some songs are evergreen, same thing with clothing. There are some stuff that you buy and it is just there looking at you.

Those are the kinds of clothes that people give you to help them market but those choice clothes are hardly given to you because they sell them fast. But if you have funds, you go for choice goods. Clothing is like our generation; it is fast, trends change in months so if you don’t have funds, your success will be limited. You will succeed but to an extent.

Going into local production:

For now, I bring in stuff from abroad but sometimes when I run out of goods, I source from the local markets. Cost of production in Nigeria is high; power is not stable so it is cheaper to import than to produce.  I am trusting that things will improve so if power is stable, why not? I would love to produce locally.

Banning is good but…

Importation of textile is not even legal, but the law is not strictly enforced because our textile companies are not producing due to high cost of production. The problem I have with Nigerians is that they always want a forceful  change without counting the cost; they don’t look at the parameters, they just say yes, we want the dollar to be so so; how are you going to bring the dollar rate down? What are the things you want to do to bring the dollar rate down?

You say you want change, how is the change going to come about? There are things you need to put in place but we don’t want to do all that, we just want to ban. I don’t have issues with banning, I am not an advocate of importation but let us face reality. What are the things we have on ground? Can we really produce? The essence of wanting to produce here is for you to patronize indigenous factories or products.

Now, for a businessman, the motive is to maximise profit. If as a business person I produce here and I don’t make profit, I fold up. There are other factors like acceptability, how patriotic are we? You find out that locally made products are more expensive than imported ones. For example, men’s shirts; the ones from Turkey are cheaper than those made locally which they tell you are hand-woven.

What are we trying to achieve? We want to bridge the gap, to make affordable clothes but we find out that the ones we produce are more expensive, how are people going to buy? If Shirt A is imported and sells for N6,000 while Shirt B is locally made and goes for N10,000 because of the cost of production,  which one would you rather buy? These are the factors I look at as an individual. The aim of this whole thing is about profit meaning if you can’t make profit, the business closes down. You are not running a charity organisation, you are in the business to make money and when there is no profit, by the time you do it once or twice, you pack up.

Employees:

Presently, I have one. I have had some experiences here with some of these young people; they are not focused. Today, they are here and tomorrow, they are out. They want money they don’t work for. It is a challenge. Someone comes in here today to work for you, she wants to be paid a huge sum of money and she is not ready to work to contribute to the growth of the company, all she wants is the money and you know, the level of immorality has worsened the case when it comes to having to employ young girls because they are distracted.

They work for a few months and they are gone because some guy  comes in and gives them that amount of money you pay them in a month in just one day and they are like; ‘if someone can give me this in a day, then what am I  doing here?’ So once they meet one, two or three guys, they are gone. You also have some people who are focused who from here go to school and improve themselves.