Company: Wakuda
Website: https://www.wakuda.co.uk
Business: Wakuda is a multi-award winning online marketplace to shop unique, culturally inspired gifts from Black-owned businesses.
About Nathaniel Wade and Albert Larter and Wakuda
Wakuda is a multi-award winning online marketplace to shop unique, culturally-inspired gifts from Black-owned businesses.
Launched in 2020 after the founders’ struggles with finding products in the mainstream market that related to them culturally or that were tailored to their needs as Black consumers.This ranged from greeting cards to hair care products. They knew many Black business owners were already creating these products but accessing them wasn’t always easy due to lack of representation.
The founders pooled together their business experiences – Albert’s 10 years expertise in digital marketing and Nathaniel’s operational and property background – to Launch Wakuda to solve this problem.
The pair did not have expertise in web development, so navigating the technical elements of building a multi-vendor marketplace was challenging. However, they used this to their advantage by launching with a basic, off-the-shelf solution to gather feedback from users to build a roadmap.
Wakuda offers a seamless, cultural shopping experience whilst creating a positive impact in the Black community through increased revenues for the business owners, job creation, and a long term vision for overall economic empowerment.
Since launching, the startup has built a community of over 20,000 people and worked with companies such as Retail Week, SAP and Meta. They were most recently named as one of the 100 most inspiring small businesses in Britain and are finalists in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards.
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