Brand fever hits Kenya

Exhibition halls and Facebook
But it isn’t just the big brands located in suburban malls that are profiting from Kenya’s taste for designer fashion.

Clothing stores in downtown Nairobi’s exhibition halls, which carry the latest trends from the Far East, Dubai and Turkey,  are also booming.

Kenya’s exhibition hall is a multitude of stores with minimum space packed into a labyrinth-like structure on a single or multi-floor building. These stalls, like many of the boutique stores that can be found in malls, import clothing and accessories but they perform significantly better and average sales worth  $46,200 in a month – the equivalent of the Levi’s store at Junction in a peak month – suggests that their clientele have as high a disposable income as those that frequent shopping centres.

A larger number of Kenyans are also turning to Facebook to buy the latest designs, and according to Kenyan blog Kachwanya.com, which is dedicated to e-commerce and tech ventures, Facebook is the number-one fashion-selling website in Kenya today.

It is emerging as an option to the Net-a-Porter concept (which has been popularised in Kenya by Chico Leco, Closet 49 and Bidorbuy.co.ke) and appeals to Kenyans who have not wholly embraced e-commerce. The direct engagement between buyer and seller that Facebook allows, coupled with boda boda (motorbike) deliveries and payment through M-Pesa or cash on delivery, has seen a boom in the number of clothing businesses that prosper online without a physical location.

One of the Kenyan businesses that has embraced Facebook as a sales platform and is performing well is Classy Chic, which stocks clothing brands from England and the US, and has amassed 38,000 likes in just over a year. Co-owner Winnie Njeru explained that after being unsuccessful with a boutique store in Mombasa, she and her partner decided to venture onto Facebook.

“We opted for a strategy that would ensure rapid market penetration and enhance cost control. Since most of our target clientele are the young (and the young-at-heart) ladies who are on social media, Facebook was a natural choice,” she said.

Platforms like OLX, Mzoori, Jumia and OffersAfrica are combining their website-driven business strategy with Facebook to tap into online fashion sales. Mogaka Mwencha, Managing Director of Mzoori, attests to the success of Facebook as a sales platform in Kenya especially for fashion products.

“It’s a fantastic market aggregation platform. The 2m+ Kenyans on Facebook primarily come from the middle class, and this is also the consumer class. And since Facebook literally knows the types of products that these people ‘Like’, it makes it easy for a retailer to reach a very targeted market segment, which traditional marketing channels like radio, print or television cannot do,” he says.

Other advantages of Facebook that he highlights include the word-of-mouth factor, which he describes “as every marketer’s Holy Grail”, and the ability to freely list items.

The move of fashion sales towards a form of online shopping could prophesy the shrinking footprint of clothing stores that target middle class consumers in Kenya. But it alludes to a split between the privileged and the aspirational, and is a shift that international brands are yet to focus on as they establish a presence in the market.