How the Founder of House of Tara Launched a Beauty Empire With Just N15, 000
Nigerian entrepreneur Tara Fela-Durotoye turned a love of makeup into 23-strong chain of cosmetics stores and 14 beauty schools with 10,000 reps all around Africa.
Tara Fela-Durotoye, with a startup capital of N15, 000 ($36) sparked a revolution that reverberated across Nigeria. At the time, she was a Law undergraduate providing bridal makeup services from her living room — her first foray into the makeup and cosmetics business world.
Her iconic corporate brand, House of Tara is now worth millions of dollars, a history of glowing press, and a range of interesting makeup and skincare lines aimed at women of color that sell out as soon as they launch.
How did it get here? Let’s rewind over ten years ago.
Tara’s business and entrepreneurial journey started out of the desire to have top quality indigenous makeup products that worked for Nigerians: Nigerians had relied on only international products shipped into Africa. After getting inspiration from an advertiser’s lecture about entrepreneurship back in secondary school, she gave birth to her business acumen.
House of Tara launched with the country’s first bridal directory and later set up international standard makeup studios, even setting up Nigeria’s first makeup school. The company has since expanded into areas of retail, distribution channel management and education.
Not only do they produce cosmetic products for dark skin and other undertones, they also empower women and groom young entrepreneurs in the beauty industry. What can budding beauty entrepreneurs learn from her story?
We’ve spotlighted few lessons on how to launch and grow your beauty business successfully just like Tara’s:
Do your homework and become an expert
Tara tapped into an industry that continues to thrive — beauty and personal care market size in Africa has been forecasted to grow by $1.26 billion during 2021–2025.
Once limited to black people, particularly Africans, there are now wider varieties of beauty products available to choose from many local brands. The Nigerian beauty and personal care market is currently worth more than $1.256 billion at retail and is forecast to reach more than $1.311 billion next year, according to Euromonitor International, a global market intelligence publisher.
It’s amazing how large the industry has grown and this continuous rise is good news for new businesses in the space. It’s no longer just a mom-and-pop industry. Zaron, a cosmetics brand started after Founder Oke Maduewesi quit her paid job to get more managerial and leadership skills. Oke sold everything including her house to launch what is now a beauty empire that is empowering women all over the world.
Tara had a similarly lean start, launching House of Tara from her living room, as a bridal makeup artist. In a bid to carve a niche and create a name for herself in the then relatively new beauty business, she attended several courses to give her desire and passion a direction. She read lots of books that helped her to come up with a mission statement for her company and create structures and systems.
Just do it (no excuses)
Tara went the extra mile each day, offering services, with positive results to as many people as possible, even sometimes doing it for free. “I started at a time when it wasn’t even popular for people generally to be entrepreneurs, unlike what obtains now. Many people, who were my peers, didn’t even fully understand the concept. Even for me, I didn’t wake up one morning to be an entrepreneur. The focus was on doing what I loved, which is, making women beautiful,” she says of her entrepreneurial experience in those early days.
From bridal make-up, her clientele began to expand. According to her: “Each time people saw me do this, they complimented my work and the more I did, the more people talked about me and my business to other people and the more referrals I got.” Her initial investment was exactly N15, 000 (which was less than the cost of a blackberry phone at that time).
After years of hard work, she got her big breakout that brought her to limelight when she featured in the Ovation Magazine as the official make-up artist for a celebrity wedding.
Embrace sound financial management skills
We might have left finances to last, but where the money to fund your business comes from hangs over your entire business plan. Every step you’ll take has financial implications as such you won’t be able to run a successful beauty brand without having a firm grip on finances. Having sound plans for raising finance at various junctures in your business is just wise business practice.
Your business plan needs to cover the different types of funding options available to you now and in the future, whether ‘love money’ loaned from friends and family, bank loans or other sources such as crowdfunding. You need to understand and pre-empt what your potential investors will ask you about financing and demonstrate in your business plan that you and your business are worth investing in.
If you are reading this, it is likely you are thinking of starting an independent beauty business. The first, and easiest, thing to do for your business’s financial well-being is separate your finances. Keeping your personal finances separate from your business finances offers many advantages, from simplifying your accounting to protecting your personal property and other assets.
Separating your finances has other advantages too. Calculating tax deductions, and overall tax preparation, is much simpler when your company has its own bank account. It’s also easier to figure out if that Tuesday afternoon lunch was with a client or a friend when your personal and business receipts aren’t mixed together. Even if you can easily distinguish one set of expenses from another, sorting a pile of paper come tax season wastes valuable time, and paying a chartered professional accountant to do it for you can be expensive.
As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You’ll never be able to see every bump in the financial road ahead, but you can avoid surprises and keep your business healthy by building a solid budget and keeping track of your money.
Creating a sample budget will give you a general idea of what to expect in your first months and years of operation. Over time, your budgets will become easier to create, and you’ll get better at forecasting expenses and revenues throughout the year. A great way to start your budget is by writing out a list of every possible item you think your business will need — from the technology used to create your inventory to the day-to-day items in your office. A quick Google search for examples of budgets in your industry can help you figure out anything you might have missed.
In the beginning, projecting sales is part research, part educated guess. The longer you’re in industry, the better you’ll be at predicting these numbers and knowing when your peaks and valleys will be throughout the year.
If your beauty business started as a side hustle, you may already have some preliminary sales data. Even a few numbers can help you figure out which of your products are bestsellers and what times of year your sales will be high or low.
If you have no data to start with, you still can gather useful information from an accountant or financial expert that will also help you be better prepared when talking about your finances to potential investors.
Ensure smooth expansion and growth
If you are looking to expand and increase your profits, you need to move slowly, with careful consideration. Part of how to grow your beauty business successfully lies in ensuring the growth is smooth. Bumps along the way are inevitable, but too many bumps may discourage you or affect your profits too much for you to continue.
Make sure you’re always on top of recalculating your budget because as you grow, you’ll need to amend your budget and direct funds to different areas of your business. While you will already have beauty insurance, if you’re a serious professional, you may need to upgrade your insurance to take into account extra equipment, different premises, employees, vehicle insurance for a mobile business etc.
There are also new taxes you’ll need to start paying, such as employment tax or sales tax. The beauty industry is growing and this may be the perfect time for you to consider how to grow your beauty business. Keeping your records, books, and accounting in order will give you a clear picture of your company’s financial health and needs. This, in turn, will enable you to make the best decisions for your company’s future.
Whether you’re going it alone or hiring a financial professional, it always helps to seek advice from other successful entrepreneurs in your field or to consult with a good Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Knowing how to track and manage your finances will give you peace of mind that more than makes up for any challenges you may face building the skill. And the more you learn to manage money, the easier and more intuitive it will become.
When Tara began she formed a board of directors of eight persons with two of them being members of her family. She also drafted a company policy document consisting of her company’s vision, how she planned to actualize that vision, code of conduct within the organization, the culture and the way they related to customers. Today, House of Tara is a genuine powerhouse and game changer in the cosmetics industry in Nigeria and an inspiration for the rest of Africa.
With a thorough beauty business plan, careful hiring, and consideration of factors that will ensure smooth growth, you can also give your beauty business the right boost in the industry.
