She has a mini-factory that produces 12 boxes of cupcakes or cookies every day. “The demand for my cookies is so high that what I am producing now can barely satisfy the market,” said ‘Mamojela Masopha, the former student of the National University of Lesotho (NUL). Her cookies are not only known for heavenly taste—oh boy! do they have an elegant appearance!
Her business is called The Cookie Kingdom. Her mission is to shakeup the biscuit and cake industries, in and outside the country.
[Drop them a WhatsApp: +266 62008684]
Listen, even as she details her attack plans.
If you are among those with a sweet tooth, or can be counted among those who live to eat (some people eat to live), you may have realized that you have limited options. First, it is either you buy a big (expensive) cake if you want to enjoy something really good. Or you buy all kinds of decorated biscuits if you just want something with which to go by.
“What is very lacking in the market are products that serve the role of biscuits, while they taste like cakes…that is where we come in,” she said.
Basically, with The Cookie Kingdom, their cookies make you feel like you are in a wedding—everyday!
This is where it all started.
[Be part of Innovation, join PhuthaLichaba here: www.phuthalichaba.com, The future Bank of the People under the NUL Innovation Hub]
“I have always loved cooking,” ‘Mamojela related. “When I look back, I realize that before I entered tertiary, I did better in cooking courses in high school than in other subjects.” However, she said she didn’t notice it at that time because all she wanted was to get into tertiary. But now that she is back into cooking, she is like, “oh wow, I have always been into this thing after all!”
So one day her finances were not going particularly well.That would turn out to be a proverbial defining moment. As they say, the so-called crisis situations are times where we can either progress or regress. She chose to progress.
“I made cup-cakes and sold them at my work,” she revealed. That adventure took an interesting turn when she saw people just loving the cookies. In time, she would go online where even more interest was shown.
Then she had to change gears.
You see, one mistake Basotho always make is to self-employ (ba ea ikhira). If you are self-employed forever, here is your fate. Your business will never grow— you will work yourself to death—and your business will die the day you die. In your burial, people will start wailing, “she was a hard worker, no one will ever produce like her.”
All such “praises” are a sign that you, the dead, failed to leave a legacy.So next time somebody encourages you, “you must be self-employed,” even if that someone is a government, tell them the above story.
So she was wise enough to realize that she needed to hire other people to work for her, after all, she herself already had a job, “I hired two ladies and they have been amazing.” Now she didn’t just hire. She looked for people where were able to assist in research and who were good at using computers or smartphones.
“That is because in this business, small as it is, we do research every day,” She said. So those fantastic designs and amazing taste, as it is usually the case with all good things, did not come by chance after all! “We research like no other, literally every day,” she repeated with emphasis.
The result has been that her staff is now able to operate independent of her.
Ya!
When you own a business in which you can spend a couple of weeks in Bahamas without an inch of worry and without anyone of your staff ever calling you, or WhatsApping you, then you know you have nailed a business. However, if your business is you, you are in trouble—biiiiiig trouble.
So now it’s time to grow. ‘Mamojela thinks they have outgrown their space. They need a bigger space and they need more workers to get more volumes coming out. “We are based in Butha-Buthe,” she said. However, her cookies seem to have put the rest of Maseru on fire. So she transports the cookies mostly to Maseru, “we are looking at ways to make them less costly to our Maseru fans.”
The future plans also include making sure that the cookies have a longer shelf-life so you can find them in retail shops around country—and beyond.
For those of us who live to eat, these are good times!
[Be part of Innovation, join PhuthaLichaba here: www.phuthalichaba.com, The future Bank of the People under the NUL Innovation Hub]
