There’s an old saying in Nigeria that one can outfit an entire home in a single drive across Lagos, buying everything from cutlery and furniture to food and decor from the thousands of hawkers that aggressively sell their wares along — and in the middle of — the congested city’s potholed streets.
Now Nigerians have another option for comprehensive shopping. It’s a website called Jumia, and because it’s based online, shoppers don’t have to brave mind-numbing traffic to get their goods as the budding retail portal handles nearly all the schlepping with its nationwide network of 120 delivery trucks.
Jumia co-founder Tunde Kehinde sat down with International Business Times at the company’s massive Lagos campus earlier this month to discuss the company’s humble beginnings, its massive growth and the goals and challenges that lie ahead for the site, which is the country’s most popular online retailer
Jumia is not a name known to many Westerners, but it can best be described as Africa’s answer to Jeff Bezos’ multibillion-dollar Amazon empire, though its tale of ascendancy tracks to a much shorter timeline.
Officially launched under the name Kasuwa in June 2012, the company that was later rebranded as Jumia has definitely captured the attention of investors, as top firms including J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Summit Partners have already backed the start-up to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, though Kehinde declined to discuss its balance sheet.
“We launched in a small conference room in Lagos with initial funding from Rocket Internet, a German tech incubator, and we simply went about getting as many local suppliers as we could and building a quality team to create an amazing shopping experience,” said Kehinde, a tall, mild-mannered man who wore dark-blue traditional batik clothing for our interview.
From that low-key start, the company has quickly grown to become a major player in the continent’s retail industry, currently offering more than 100,000 different products from computers and books to makeup and clothing to consumers in six countries across Africa.
The company — which grows and changes at lightning speed, meaning this information will likely soon be outdated — currently promises to deliver any item in its 90,000 central warehouse in the Ikeja district of Lagos to any location in the city within a single day, and anywhere in the entire country within five days.
