Maka, an African style and sweetness e-commerce platform, has raised a $2.65 million pre-seed spherical led by Pan-African enterprise capital companies 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital. Different buyers embody Palm Drive Capital, angel investor Jonathan Shipman, founding father of EVP and Twitch founding member, and executives from supply platform Wolt.
In 2021, co-founder and CEO Diana Owusu-Kyereko based Maka as an interactive social commerce platform, which, by means of reside try-on hauls, opinions, and user-generated content material from each creators and clients, allows customers to find merchandise tailor-made to their kinds in a scalable means.
Earlier than beginning the e-commerce enterprise, Owusu-Kyereko was the ex-CEO of Jumia Ghana and ex-CCO of Jumia Kenya. She mentioned launching Maka started through the pandemic when she was in Ghana and struggled to search out inclusive style inspiration. As a typical repatriate, Owusu-Kyereko had a routine of touring to London every time she wanted to buy. However realizing she couldn’t do that in restricted journey prompted her to discover alternate options. When looking for suggestions, pals directed her to mainstream websites and influencers.
Owusu-Kyereko mentioned she turned intrigued by why everybody prompt buying on platforms like ASOS and Instagram or visiting costly boutiques. To delve deeper, she surveyed a whole lot of individuals in Ghana and Nigeria, specializing in their most well-liked buying avenues; it turned evident that buying was a difficult expertise and a spot that wanted addressing.
In response to her, amongst explored buying strategies, Instagram stood out because the “Wild Wild West,” the place what you see is probably not what you get, and pre-payment is usually required with restricted choices for refunds or returns. In the meantime, whereas providing a private contact, conventional markets could possibly be disturbing, resulting in reliance on private buyers. Moreover, cross-border buying from platforms like ASOS and Shein offered challenges associated to funds and logistics.
“In all, it was quite complex and complicated for the user. And so I saw that you had a problem with trust in the buying process. People had their horror stories about buying online. Then the other thing was that this aggregation of everybody’s needs in one place was also not there. And that’s what sparked Maka,” the founder and CEO mentioned. “So at first, it was like COVID, and being unable to travel to buy stuff felt like a me-problem. And then, like, doing interviews and surveys in the market and realizing that this is a wider challenge for consumers than I thought.”
Diana Owusu-Kyereko (co-founder and CEO, MAKA)
Owusu-Kyereko launched Maka six months after departing Jumia, focusing on Africa’s millennials and Gen Zers in an e-commerce market that could be a largely untapped marketplace for style manufacturers. The surge in expertise adoption, significantly among the many youthful demographic, has propelled e-commerce penetration from 13% in 2017 to 28% in 2021, reaching 334 million customers. This speedy enlargement presents substantial alternatives for Maka to attach with a broader client base throughout the continent, particularly specializing in the style sector and the creator economic system.
Maka’s platform identifies and solves two elementary issues: a belief difficulty within the shopping for course of and the problem creators face in monetizing their affect. To handle the belief aspect, Maka leverages movies as a method to attach customers with trusted creators. In low-trust markets, we now have noticed that video is a robust software for constructing belief. It successfully conveys info, drives conversion, and establishes rapport between the consumer, the reviewer, and the client.
Seeing objects on a creator they belief offers customers confidence of their buying choices. Initially, the startup thought-about constructing a market the place creators, shoppers, distributors, and types coexist, with creators showcasing merchandise. Nevertheless, it realized that clients prioritize the peace of mind that what they see is what they get, optimizing their restricted disposable revenue on significant purchases. In essence, each buyer can grow to be a creator.
Notably, the platform provides a overview possibility, permitting clients who make purchases to share their suggestions by means of video opinions, normally between 30 and 60 seconds lengthy. These opinions present priceless insights for different customers, influencing their shopping for choices. In response to the CEO, this characteristic has considerably impacted each these making purchases and people creating the opinions, fostering a way of neighborhood and belief throughout the Maka platform.
“That’s what makes us so scalable because I think in the creator economy, if you focus on sort of just the big creators, you have a small pool of creators that you can work with, and that’s what we’ve kind of learned from the beginning,” she mentioned. “What you need is kind of like a scalable base of creators, and that’s why the user-generated content model is so powerful, and that’s why everybody can be a creator is so powerful because then it’s scalable because you have an infinite amount of people who can create video content on the platform based on purchases, versus working with only a select group of creators to create content on the platform.”
Moreover, the corporate has a rewards system to incentivize customers to add these video opinions. Every time a buyer/creator uploads a overview, they earn N500 (50 cents); on common, a creator on Maka produces about seven movies per consumer, in line with Owusu-Kyereko. Along with incomes factors for every video overview, creators accumulate factors when others make purchases primarily based on their opinions. Moreover, creators can obtain their opinions from Maka and share them on different social media platforms, incomes further factors for every share. These factors may be transformed into money to buy on the platform.
Since its inception, Maka claims to have garnered over 500,000 downloads, numbers it acquired through its preliminary mannequin of participating with creators by means of reside periods. Nevertheless, from its user-generated content material mannequin launched two months in the past, the two-year-old startup has seen over 2,000 opinions created. What’s subsequent for the corporate? Owusu-Kyereko mentioned that Maka will use the funds to increase its workforce and operational improvement, improve its expertise, and deepen its presence in Ghana and Nigeria.
Fatoumata Bâ, founder and government chair of Janngo Capital, talking on the funding, mentioned her agency was drawn to Maka’s imaginative and prescient of leveraging expertise to empower each shoppers and creators, cementing the startup’s place on the forefront of the junction between e-commerce, artistic and cultural industries throughout Africa. “These three sectors are jointly poised to grow by 4x by 2050 and generate up to $200 billion GDP while creating 184 million jobs,” she famous. “We are proud to lead this funding round to help unlock a potential of massive growth and impact on the continent.”
