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THE MIDLANDS
UK BLACK BUSINESS GUIDE 2021-22
J
amii is the home for Black creators and makers. An online marketplace for British brands on-the-up. A discount card for committed shoppers. And pop ups on the high street. We make Black creators easier to discover and shop; we help minimise small business growing pains by centralising customer service (and increasingly fulfilment), so the customer experience is seamless and the sales keep flowing. Terory Briscoe-Larebo and I came up with the idea for Jamii in 2015, inspired by the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement and the spark it ignited in many of us to be more conscious consumers and be more active drivers of change. We wondered: how can we encourage ourselves to buy from black creators on a regular basis - and could we encourage others? At the time, Terory had a TasteCard and wondered if we could apply the same concept: it would encourage customers to try a new business and return, help businesses to reach them, and offer the platform itself a more robust business model than the directory-based websites that existed at the time. We met at the University of Manchester and had only just graduated. We didn’t set out to become entrepreneurs, but we saw a need that needed to be filled and thought we had an idea that could do it. Soon afterwards, I went to Kenya to take part in an International Citizenship programme working with micro-entrepreneurs on their businesses. (Terory also did it a few months later.) It was there that I started to understand and experience the inner operations of a small business: the challenges, the access to opportunity (or lack thereof), the savvy resourcefulness needed to thrive. It gave me the confidence to just try. And when I came back, I took the first step to pick up the phone and get our first business on board. Our pre-launch journey was lightning fast: we built a basic site, on-boarded our first partnered businesses and went live within 6 months. For the first 2 years, Jamii was a passion project worked on outside of our fulltime work - in every hour we could spare, we were speaking to new partners, working on our marketing or planning out our future. Until, at the beginning of 2019, I took a leap of faith and dropped down to a part-time role to dedicate more time to it. The extra time meant that I could really understand the business we were building and where we could make the most impact, and so we decided to expand out of our sales-focus to create a platform that could support black creators in a more holistic way: Workshops to help creators learn and grow their businesses; networking and fostering meaningful connections; collaborative marketing and retail initiatives (such as our pop up shops). By the end of 2019, we had run sold-out events, gained national media attention and partnered with Sony, MTV and Bauer Media to launch in-house marketplaces. In 2020, we expanded further. I started working on Jamii fulltime and Courtney, my sister, joined me. We launched our online marketplace so customers could shop black creators more easily, placing and tracking their orders from one place. We ran 2 hugely-successful pop up shops in Shoreditch, which saw us gain nation-
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Inspired
how can we encourage ourselves to buy from black creators on a regular basis
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