By Dipo Olowookere
A business-to-business (B2B) platform called Craftmerce, which was designed to create an opportunity for African brands to sell their products to a global market, has been launched in Nigeria.
Craftmerce was formed by the duo of Cynthia Asije and Sarah Odiavbara to help merchants with exceptional African products to gain access to international retailers and foster a long-term global business relationship.
It was gathered that the initiative was birthed after Ms Asije launched her first venture, Adire Lounge, in 2015 and struggled to market the product to international retailers.
This gap forced her to restrategize and brought about Craftmerce to help business owners with good products have a B2B marketplace to sell their products and save them the issues she earlier encountered.
After months of meticulous planning, the team, backed by Be Ondeck Accelerator, and with support from DHL to ensure easy carriage of brands products, has unveiled their website, which would be used by African entrepreneurs to reach a global audience.
A look at the new Craftmerce website shows that it is user-friendly, simple to navigate and organized into easily accessible categories like Food & Spices, Fashion, Beauty & Skincare, amongst others.
For merchants, they can register to sell on Craftmerce within a few minutes, while shoppers can navigate the products on the platform to purchase any of their choices.
Already, the platform has onboarded hundreds of brands across 13 African countries and a network of over 3,000 retailers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Europe and hopes to do even more before the end of the year.
According to the founders, new features will be rolled out after this launch as retailers would be able to apply for Craftmerce credit via the buy now pay later (BNPL) feature to shop from African brands, while African brands and makers will enjoy advance credit tool to scale their production.
Craftmerce, the founders said, is committed to collaborating with reputable African brands that are authentic, small batch production, of high quality and trustworthy, as well as socially and environmentally responsible.
Adedapo Adesanya