Inthing: Selling African Fashion To The World With 90% Uganda-made Products.
The fashion industry is a fast-growing industry in Africa and Uganda especially in these recent years as we are seeing many fashion events, awards, companies and moguls budding out of late.
Inthing is one of the youngest but also unique companies into the arena, started by 27-Year old Kuremu, Inthing is an e-commerce fashion store that prides itself in selling the African brand of fashion to the world. He defines their business model as one with both drop shipping (linking buyers and sellers) plus their ability to conceive ideas and actualize them into products from the inthing studios.
“Inthing simply means the trending thing or something in style. I felt the word was perfect fit for what I wanted to do, which was sale the trending fashion style just at a tap(online).” Kuremu told us why he had to chose that particular name further adding that it started as a physical fashion boutique with the vision pointing towards e-commerce, a move they fully took on when Covid-19 struck.
Inthing acessible via www.inthing.ug sets itself apart as the only online platform selling specifically fashion and lifestyle products made 90% by Ugandans. Kuremu stresses the fact that Inthing supports many jobs down the value chain, from the cotton farmers to the designers/tailors and more creatives on the fashion and lifestyle space. The company majors in men’s and women’s fashion, beauty products and accessories that are mostly wanted by the young people.
One of the most popular products on the platform is the “Kitenge kimonos” which is made out of African prints and patterns, dyed on cotton fabric popularly known as kitenge. It goes for 40000ugx.
“COVID-19 was a very challenging moment but we learnt to improvise, employed lesser people, the team had to Multi-task and we therefore stayed focused to the companies values.” Kuremu says alluding to the fact that the pandemic unlocked their potential and pushed them a mile into their mission.
“Fashion is at the core of Inthing, I can’t predict the future but I think we shall stick to fashion. Fashion itself is so diverse.” that was Kuremu’s response when we asked if they had hopes of expanding the online shop into other products outside fashion. He also feels that most online shops offer too much of everything but nothing of the real things a thing that doesn’t feel okay with him. The urge to satisfy his customers pushes him to focus on one product(fashion) which gives him an opportunity to hit all the majors ranging from market research, product knowledge, studying consumption patterns and understanding customers needs among others.
We asked Kuremu how he addresses the biggest challenge of e-commerce which is the inaccessibility to feel sense of the product and the challenge of disatifaction among the customers after what they receive fails to draw the same impression like what they ordered! He says “O,ur customers pay for the product on delivery, we also have a return policy just incase the customer is not impressed. However, most of all our customer’s satisfaction is our aim.”
Kuremu’s 15-year vision puts Inthing in the postition of a Pan African brand supporting thousands of designers as they sale their creations ‘but also giving customers a variety of the best in fashion and lifestyle products’.
With fashion technology which has gone as far as 3D fabric modeling he envisions the future of the industry as a bright one especially for Africa sighting the African models who are now ‘hot’ on the runways, and the fabrics that are more popular.
One thing we should credit Inthing for is the fact that they didn’t adopt the ‘Ugandan Online Sellers’ syndrome’ – Inbox for price.