Maka, an African style and sweetness e-commerce platform, has raised a $2.65 million pre-seed spherical led by Pan-African enterprise capital corporations 4DX Ventures and Janngo Capital. Different traders 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 dwell try-on hauls, critiques, and user-generated content material from each creators and prospects, allows customers to find merchandise tailor-made to their types 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 in the course of the pandemic when she was in Ghana and struggled to seek out inclusive style inspiration. As a typical repatriate, Owusu-Kyereko had a routine of touring to London at any time when she wanted to buy. However realizing she couldn’t do that in restricted journey prompted her to discover alternate options. When searching for suggestions, pals directed her to mainstream websites and influencers.
Owusu-Kyereko mentioned she grew to become intrigued by why everybody recommended procuring 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 popular procuring avenues; it grew to become evident that procuring was a difficult expertise and a niche that wanted addressing.
In line with her, amongst explored procuring strategies, Instagram stood out because the “Wild Wild West,” the place what you see might not be what you get, and pre-payment is commonly required with restricted choices for refunds or returns. In the meantime, whereas providing a private contact, conventional markets might be hectic, resulting in reliance on private buyers. Moreover, cross-border procuring from platforms like ASOS and Shein introduced challenges associated to funds and logistics.
“In all, it was fairly complicated and complex for the consumer. And so I noticed that you simply had an issue with belief within the shopping for course of. Individuals had their horror tales about shopping for on-line. Then the opposite factor was that this aggregation of everyone’s wants in a single place was additionally not there. And that’s what sparked Maka,” the founder and CEO mentioned. “So at first, it was like COVID, and being unable to journey to purchase stuff felt like a me-problem. After which, like, doing interviews and surveys available in the market and realizing that this can be a wider problem for customers than I believed.”
Diana Owusu-Kyereko (co-founder and CEO, MAKA)
Owusu-Kyereko launched Maka six months after departing Jumia, concentrating 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 know-how adoption, notably among the many youthful demographic, has propelled e-commerce penetration from 13% in 2017 to twenty-eight% in 2021, reaching 334 million customers. This speedy growth presents substantial alternatives for Maka to attach with a broader shopper 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 concern within the shopping for course of and the problem creators face in monetizing their affect. To deal with the belief factor, Maka leverages movies as a way to attach customers with trusted creators. In low-trust markets, we’ve got noticed that video is a robust instrument for constructing belief. It successfully conveys info, drives conversion, and establishes rapport between the consumer, the reviewer, and the customer.
Seeing objects on a creator they belief provides customers confidence of their buying selections. Initially, the startup thought of constructing a market the place creators, customers, distributors, and types coexist, with creators showcasing merchandise. Nonetheless, it realized that prospects prioritize the reassurance that what they see is what they get, optimizing their restricted disposable revenue on significant purchases. In essence, each buyer can develop into a creator.
Notably, the platform presents a evaluate possibility, permitting prospects who make purchases to share their suggestions by means of video critiques, normally between 30 and 60 seconds lengthy. These critiques present invaluable insights for different customers, influencing their shopping for selections. In line with the CEO, this characteristic has considerably impacted each these making purchases and people creating the critiques, fostering a way of group and belief inside the Maka platform.
“That’s what makes us so scalable as a result of I feel within the creator economic system, if you happen to give attention to type of simply the massive creators, you’ve a small pool of creators you could work with, and that’s what we’ve sort of discovered from the start,” she mentioned. “What you want is sort of like a scalable base of creators, and that’s why the user-generated content material mannequin is so highly effective, and that’s why everyone is usually a creator is so highly effective as a result of then it’s scalable as a result of you’ve an infinite quantity of people that can create video content material on the platform based mostly on purchases, versus working with solely a choose group of creators to create content material on the platform.”
Moreover, the corporate has a rewards system to incentivize customers to add these video critiques. Every time a buyer/creator uploads a evaluate, they earn N500 (50 cents); on common, a creator on Maka produces about seven movies per consumer, based on Owusu-Kyereko. Along with incomes factors for every video evaluate, creators accumulate factors when others make purchases based mostly on their critiques. Moreover, creators can obtain their critiques from Maka and share them on different social media platforms, incomes extra factors for every share. These factors might be transformed into money to buy on the platform.
Since its inception, Maka claims to have garnered over 500,000 downloads, numbers it acquired by way of its preliminary mannequin of partaking with creators by means of dwell periods. Nonetheless, from its user-generated content material mannequin launched two months in the past, the two-year-old startup has seen over 2,000 critiques created. What’s subsequent for the corporate? Owusu-Kyereko mentioned that Maka will use the funds to broaden its crew and operational improvement, improve its know-how, and deepen its presence in Ghana and Nigeria.
Fatoumata Bâ, founder and govt chair of Janngo Capital, talking on the funding, mentioned her agency was drawn to Maka’s imaginative and prescient of leveraging know-how to empower each customers and creators, cementing the startup’s place on the forefront of the junction between e-commerce, inventive and cultural industries throughout Africa. “These three sectors are collectively poised to develop by 4x by 2050 and generate as much as $200 billion GDP whereas creating 184 million jobs,” she famous. “We’re proud to steer this funding spherical to assist unlock a possible of huge development and affect on the continent.”