How we made it in Africa
Nigeria: How this snack food company won over informal shopkeepers
This article is an excerpt from our latest book ‘How we made it in Africa II: Real stories of entrepreneurs turning opportunity into profit‘
One Saturday in 2010, Gbola Lawson was knocking on the doors of small brick-and-mortar stores in Lagos – Nigeria’s megacity of roughly seventeen million people – trying to persuade shopkeepers to place cookies on their shelves. Although he held a full-time job in banking, he was helping his girlfriend, Debby (now his wife), grow the retail footprint of her fledgling one-person cookie business, Fastizers.