Last week we spoke to Sylvie Rosanwo about ”how I made the Impossible, possible.” Being her own Boss, a mum, a sister and overcoming her own fear. This is Part 1. Tune in next week for Part 2.
I’ve always been told that my ideas were interesting, out of the box and…unrealistic. However, when I came up with the idea of starting my own natural hair care website, I was ready to show everyone just how ‘unrealistic’ I could be. Before I started, The Woollen Head Company, I had a really good job in a company that I loved but, I believed that I wasn’t born to do just ONE thing very well. I have several aspirations and multiple skills and want to explore all my options before retirement at 65 or rather 80 by the time I get there, given how they keep pushing the retirement age nowadays.
I didn’t want to go into business alone, so I looked for another like-minded person who was also passionate about Afro hair and understood where I was coming from and wanted to go the journey with me. When I found that person it was perfect, we began to discuss and explore our ideas such as; whether we knew people that had skills we could leverage; how we get quotes for all the work that needed to be done, all the really important stuff. Once that was out of the way, we had to talk about the finer details of our partnership; it was important to ensure that we both knew what we were giving and gaining and that we were happy with the agreed terms.
We were so excited to get started that we began working straight away, only to realise that we had only bombarded ourselves with much more work than we were able to do. So we looked for people that could shoulder some of that never ending work. We found a Social Media manager and a press officer, they helped us immensely as we did not have the skills or time to complete those roles ourselves. Unfortunately, even though they were recommended to us by our close circle of friends, the relationship with our press officer did not go as we planned. It was a disappointing setback but we couldn’t afford to spend money on unsatisfactory results; only the best for The Woollen Head Company! We found another web designer by looking up the designer of a website we really liked. It seemed logical to have someone that is in our wavelength. We learnt by then to be honest in terms of our budget and expectations and luckily, they were flexible and able to create something that was perfect for us.
The Woollen Head Company is a market place, we get independent designers to sell their natural hair related amazing products and services through our website, so we had to approach the designers we really liked and pitch our website to them. We decided it would make more economic sense to build a full website once we had a satisfactory number of designers that would sell on it, there was no point in going ahead with a full website with no wares to sell! However, we still needed something to give us a bit more credibility in our pitches, so we had a presentation website set up. This allowed us to show our potential clients our vision and where they would be selling their products. Once we had a good number of clients, we did all we could to stick to the designated ‘live’ date and reached it (albeit on the last day!)
Quite a lot went into this process, a good deal of back and forth every step of the way. So many decisions to make and so many questions,such as; Should the website be bilingual? How do we get a a logo? What is our marketing strategy? We are still a work in progress and learning every day.
Sylvie runs a Natural Hair hair Market place with her sister Stephanie called the Woollen Head Company. Check in next week for part two of her amazing story. You can find her here The Wollen Head company.
