📱 Stylebitt is building digital infrastructure for African fashion

In partnership with

It’s a two-part problem:

1. There isn’t enough useful economic data on African fashion, anywhere in the ecosystem. 
   
   It’s improving in the small, easier-to-track formal sector, but the details of the huge, cash-intensive, informal sector are still largely a mystery.
   

2. The people and businesses that make up the ecosystem don’t generate enough useful data for themselves.

   
   90% of African fashion is micro-small-and-medium sized businesses, and most of those would be categorised as informal trade. Far too many are flying blind when it comes to finances and operations.

These businesses (and the sector as a whole) are cut off from growth opportunities as a result. They can’t spot them internally or qualify for them externally.

Enter Stylebitt, a Nigerian fashion-tech startup with an app that could solve both of these problems for good. It helps your local tailor digitise their records, but it’s also producing meaningful data for them, and for the fashion sector.

Table of Contents

• A fashion business operating system

• The origin story

• Why it matters

• The potential

• Africa’s fashion data gap

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A fashion business operating system

Stylebitt is not the first fashion business OS to gain ground in Africa. In South Africa for example, Chinese enterprise resource planning (ERP) software DEAR (now called Cin7 Core) is used by the likes of Pichulik, Me&B and Hannah Lavery.

ERP tools organise all the moving parts of a business’ back end into an integrated system — a single source of truth that pulls all business activity into one view. You can also cobble together your own system, integrating tools for different functions into a tech stack that works for you.

Stylebitt’s difference is that it’s for businesses that are way smaller — and way less complex. Businesses that are years away from needing enterprise scale software, are paying too much for even the handful of tools they currently use, or are struggling with manual input because they don’t use any tools or systems at all.

It’s perfectly tailored to the scale and needs of African fashion MSMEs like tailors, made-to-order designers, textile traders, leatherworkers and others who make up the dense tapestry of the informal sector across the continent.

Today, Stylebitt is available in every African country and is used by thousands of fashion entrepreneurs in over 40 of them. Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya make up the top 5.

The origin story

When Precious Aleaji and Ibrahim Gana partnered up in January 2022, all they had was a domain name and Precious’ vision for a fashion business OS in your pocket, inspired by a fashion friend’s request for a ‘paperwork‘ tool.

With Precious’ background in business administration and digital transformation, and Ibrahim’s background in product design, they made a promising pair of co-founders for the problem they hoped to solve.

But 2022 turned out to be a long stall: they cycled through 4 developers who joined and left the project. In December, Precious decided he’d sharpen his dev skills and get it done himself.

I was in their beta WhatsApp group when the app went live in May 2023. Right from the dashboard, things looked good: aside from a couple of minor bugs, the testing group was happy — and active, adopting quickly with almost no learning curve.

Since then, Stylebitt has been put through its paces by users, but also by Microsoft, CcHub and TTLabs, all sponsors/facilitators of the programs Stylebitt’s founders have joined for development support.

Why it matters

Digitisation, especially when it’s mobile-first, is often associated with ease and convenience. Stylebitt is more than that.

It’s enabling better business practices, because you can only improve what you can measure. Documented processes bring patterns to light, good and bad, for insight into bottlenecks and opportunities.

It’s expanding the economic participation potential of fashion’s MSMEs, because steady, clean financial records increase your chances of access to funding.

It’s solving a crucial data problem, by helping businesses track their everyday activity in a meaningful way. Identifying where money is being made and lost, or where time is being well spent or wasted, enables smart growth.

None of that would matter if users didn’t get on board, but they did — it’s working because it’s an incredibly simple tool that’s actually clearing a headache.

They see exactly how much they’ve earned in any period at a glance, get paid faster with quick and easy invoices they can share on Whatsapp, save customer data to the cloud, and track & deliver orders on time.

It’s a single source of truth, with the information that matters, organised to be used. When you have the data — and you know what to do with it — it’s a game changer.

Lawal of ROL Tailoring is one of many fans:

The potential

I’ve always maintained that fashion’s value to Africa is most obvious when it comes to our ongoing unemployment problem.

Making clothes is labour intensive, and requires manual skills that are accessible to pretty much any level of education. Stylebitt has the potential to grow the job pie by helping more businesses grow into employers.

It also has the potential to become a data supplier to the institutions and government departments that fund, regulate and administrate the sector, enabling them to create what we actually need.

There’s an opportunity in partnerships and integrations (i.e. logistics and fulfilment service providers) for Stylebitt to become a full service suite, growing its functionality alongside its users’ needs.

There’s even the opportunity to turn users into a network and become a meeting place for collaboration and resource sharing.

This is all on the cards for Stylebitt, according to its founders, along with an e-commerce platform, loans, and potential web 3 capabilities for managing digital inventory. The development roadmap even includes a platform 'co-designer' for users.

Africa’s fashion data gap

Let’s return to the problem: a lack of actionable data.

The challenges are as you’d expect — access to market and growth finance & infrastructure are hard to come by, and the razor-thin margins of micro-batch and made-to-order fashion are even more difficult to manage when you don’t know and can’t see your unit economics.

The issues need fixing, because 90% of African fashion is MSMEs and far too many are flying blind when it comes to finances and operations. This isn’t just capping their growth; it’s putting their own livelihoods and the whole sector’s economic contributions at risk.

The creative industries are largely considered a bad investment idea because that’s the story told by the lack of data (and poor existing data). Through daily use, Stylebitt’s users are helping create the sector data we’re missing, at a scale that could impact policy, investment and more.

‘Digital transformation‘ is a buzzy term in economic development conversations that doesn’t always translate to much when you look at what people use it to refer to. What it comes down to is using digital technology to make businesses better, and that’s exactly what Stylebitt is enabling.

That’s all for today - thoughts?