by Mazi Emeka

You know Uche Nnaji for being fashionable, and visible, but did you also know that, with business, he has built a brilliant backend?

As far as adverts go, Uche Nnaji is a breathing advert for his fashion brand and designs. He is neatly decked out in a dark colored suit, a purple brooch pinned to the lapel of his double-breasted suit when we met.

Nnaji is the Creative Director and Founder of OUCH fashion brand, one of Nigeria’s leading fashion companies. I meet with him at his upscale retail outlet on Admiralty way, Lekki Phase one, Lagos, a few minutes after he returned from his factory where he had spent the better part of the day.

Nnaji studied political science at the University of Lagos. Somehow he became a fashion entrepreneur – a venture he has been at since when he was an undergraduate making shirts for other students. He says he took up fashion to meet a need that the industry wasn’t meeting at the time.

In the beginning

“It started out as fun, while studying for my degree in political science,” Nnaji says. But people were willing to reward Nnaji for the fun he was having whilst making and designing clothes.

Counting from his university days, Nnaji has been in the industry for about fourteen years. Except for his time as an NYSC member, Nnaji has worked for himself.

After his undergraduate days, Nnaji jumped into entrepreneurship and in fourteen years built one of the most successful fashion businesses in Nigeria with a growing number of retail shops spread across the southern parts of Nigeria.

“My family didn’t believe that it is a path I should follow because of the love and concern over me being able to secure my tomorrow,” Nnaji said, the corners of his lips tucked in a smile. “They wanted me to follow the regular path of a normal 9 to 5 job but I think I was very passionate about what I wanted to and I was convenience about it. I was a rebel for a while.”

Despite having a retail outlet in one of Lagos highbrow areas and in several others within the state, Nnaji says he resisted the social and personal urge to splurge on expensive property because he believed that the money spent on such property would be better spent on extending his already growing fashion line.

This conviction came from a deep place – in his family.

Nnaji lost his father very early in life but he learnt a lot from him – including his long held belief in delayed gratification and how to save. “He would tell me in Igbo,” Nnaji recalls “’Uchechukwu, good things never finish.’”

His father had a lot to teach him, Nnaji recalls fondly. “The good thing you’re rushing to buy today, they will bring a better one next week,” he once told him. “So he taught me how to save.”

His father taught him that a good name is more valuable than money. But over time he also came to learn that he could rule his market by being true to his brand and his vision.

And he understands the importance of being an original and staying true to your course: “If you go and say that because this person is making a lot of money and you want to play in that market, you’ll lose.”

On the essence of his brand, he recalls a newly employed tailor at his factory that had made a mistake with the threading on a suit. “I told him that our customers don’t buy clothes because they don’t have clothes to wear, they buy good feelings. They want to know that it is the best that makes their cloth.”

To build a name, Nnaji – who is currently enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York – says, keep improving the quality.

Interlude

And then there is music.

Blessed with a talent in music, Nnaji started earning money very early as a teenager. He played the guitar and sang in churches in the late ‘90s. In 2012, Nnaji made a foray into the music industry, releasing different songs and also featuring songstress, Chidimma, in one of his tracks.

To him, music was another form of expressing himself and having fun. He wasn’t interested in it as a means to earn money. “I’m still shocked when people call me that they heard my music. For me it’s about good music.”

Middle of the road

Branded across Nnaji’s social media handles are the words ‘Style Doctor.’

He says the name started as a joke, with some customers describing his shops as a style clinic. “It is the customers that started calling me style doctor,” he said, laughing heartily. “They say ‘Doctor heal my style sickness, I’m here.’”

Nnaji has spoken on several international platforms, from the Africa Union to the Columbia University, New York. In 2010, Nnaji’s fashion brand, Ouch, showcased at the New York Fashion Week at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan.

“I think OUCH and House of Nwaocha were part of the pioneer brands that did the African Fashion Week, London,” he recalls. “That should be in 2010, or so.”

Despite the relative success of his designs at several international fashion shows locally and abroad, Nnaji’s fashion line has been conspicuously absent on most fashion shows in the last few years. According to him, this is intentional.

There were little or no systems to sell and distribute his products to buyers within and outside Nigeria after showcasing at fashion events. Nnaji said he was upset and discouraged by this. So he decided to focus on figuring out how to distribute his products as most established stores in Nigeria either refused or had no plan to carry clothes designed by young Nigerian designers, as he was then – at the time.

“Locally, most of the boutiques and fashion brands that had more than two stores were not willingly to carry a Nigerian label, which is a challenge,” he says.

Now slightly agitated, Nnaji points out the disadvantage that fashion brands faced at fashion shows in Nigeria where comedians and musicians are paid to perform at a fashion show and actors paid to put up a presence. Yet fashion designers have to pay the show organizers in other to showcase their designs at the event despite the hassle of creating a design, buying fabric, dealing with tailors and every other hassles.

So he decided to get rid of the flash and focus on the business.

“If we want to do shows, we should do shows for fun,” he says. “If we want to sell ticket for the show, we sell ticket. That’s how fashion shows are done all over the world. But, as you know in Nigeria, everything is done in a different way.”

Minding his business

Nnaji says that the fashion brand, Ouch, has deliberately opened brick and mortal stores across multiple locations (he has offices in Surulere, Ikeja, Lekki, Victoria Island, and Abuja) and is now focused on online stores. He quickly adds that his hope is to open stores where other Nigerian fashion brands can also display their products.

I asked him about the cost of his clothes. “I’ve heard that before,” he responds, letting out a high-pitched, childlike laughter. “Ouch is this, Ouch is that. But I wonder why are they saying this? How can you be saying the brand is too elitist when me I’m one of the masses?

“The truth is I think it is because of our vision, where we are going to. It’s an aspirational brand. I mean I come from a non-privileged background and today see where we are going. OUCH is not about clothing, it’s about a dream. We’re selling a dream.”

He is also passionate about being seeing as an inspiration. “We wanted to prove to young people that you can dream and so today – as they say – we cater to the elite,” he says. “Who are the elite? Every young person out there wants to become elite eventually! So they can wear big brands. That what we are selling: dreams.”

So, I ask, why he produces some of his clothes abroad instead of in Nigeria.

“As a student I was producing in Yaba,” he tells me. “After NYSC and as a job hunter I was producing in Onigbongbo, Maryland and I had this little factory there. Tailors pushed me outside – Nigerian tailors and their mentality pushed me outside.”

Nigerian tailors, he says, lacked an eye for careful detailing that is true to the OUCH brand. In a bid to protect his brand and avoid his customers saying that because his clothes are made in Nigeria that is why it lack high detailing, Nnaji outsourced production out of the country.

“We wanted a situation whereby customers will stop saying ‘It’s because it is made in Nigeria that is why it is not detailed,” he says, pointing to his suit with a little drama. “Look at their button holes. Look at the finishing.”

But there is hope: “We’ve started a factory and we are now making things in Nigeria. At least thirty percent of our products are made locally.”

In July this year, Nnaji launched another store in Port Harcourt, adding to his growing number of fashion outlets around Nigeria.

As our conversation comes to an end, Nnaji reveals to me that he plans to open another store in a few months.

He is not even playing.