How I navigated turbulence to build a Sh1b fashion brand
Enterprise
By
Graham Kajilwa
| Jun 03, 2026
At 58, Wandia Gichuru visits the gym four times a week. It is one of the religious duties she does as an ardent believer in James Clear’s gospel of Atomic Habits.
She has also developed a liking for Artificial Intelligence (AI), albeit late, she says. Six months ago, she was not as passionate about AI as she is today.
The co-founder and chief executive of Vivo Fashion Group says AI is now part and parcel of her business. She even jokes that if a business owner does not have a co-founder, they can use AI platforms to bounce off ideas.
This month, Vivo Fashion Group will be 15 years in business. And last year, the business surpassed the Sh1 billion revenue mark.
She calls it the highlight of her entrepreneurial journey. “A lot of people do not believe fashion is business,” she says.
She goes on to debunk this narrative by listing Tadashi Yanai, Japan’s richest person, who is the founder and president of Fast Retailing, the holding company of Uniqlo, a clothing business; Amancio Ortega, the richest person in Spain who owns Zara, a fashion company and Bernard Arnault, the richest in France who is the chief executive of LVMH, the business behind Louis Vuitton and Dior.
“People wake up and dress every day,” she says. “Yet in Africa, with 1.5 billion people, the clothes we wear are imported.”
Small businesses
As such, jobs and the economies of those markets are growing at the expense of Africa. This is the opportunity her business is taking advantage of.
Today, Vivo Fashion Group employs 450 people and boasts of 29 stores in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.
In 2024, through a grant commitment from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Vivo Fashion Group opened a store in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US. It was its 27th shop.
“Unfortunately, the following year, President Donald Trump came in and closed USAID. We lost all the money. We had to close the store after one year, but it was still a fantastic experience,” she says.
“Last year, the highlight for us was that it was the first year we hit revenue of Sh1 billion.”
Speaking during Britam Biashara Network, a platform organised by Britam, a financial services company, for small businesses to interact, Gichuru intimated how she grew the business to the brand it is today.
From avoiding loans and depending on friends and family, to developing a strategy mid-way and now adopting AI, Gichuru says a point of pride for every entrepreneur should be whenever they create a new job.
“We want to move away from bringing in bales of clothes, half of which are not even sellable,” she says. “If we make our clothes, we create 10 to 15 times more jobs.
Everything from design, cutting, stitching, finishing and creating content, everything is done here, and then we sell in our own shops in brands that belong to us. This is the vision that we have.”
The turning point of her business can be traced back to 2016, when she enrolled in Stanford Seed, a project by Stanford University that she says helped her put together a strategy.
“Actually, until that point, I had no plan. We were just going as we could,” she recalls.
The result was that in 2019, the business moved to a new facility, doubling capacity and initiated plans to create Shop Zetu, its online shopping platform.
Vivo Fashion Group was born in 2011 with a capital of Sh10 million. Gichuru says she had saved this money from her years in international development, where she held key positions with the United Kingdom government, the United Nations and the World Bank.
Back then, she was importing before local manufacturing commenced in 2013.
“In the course of these 15 years, we have raised a little bit of money from friends and family. We have not taken any private equity or venture capital,” she says.
“We have not borrowed because the interest rates were very high. We just grew slowly using our own profit and a little bit of money from friends.”
One of the challenges with local production, she says, is that factories were offering very high price points. It then became important for everything to be done in-house.
“It is not because we are trying to be selfish about it, but the truth is in many of these things, we could not find partners that would manufacture for us at the price point and the small quantities that we needed,” she observes.
“When I went to talk to other factories, they were like, yes, we would do it, but give us an order of 10,000 for one dress. We could not do that. We needed to build that capacity in-house.” Gichuru says now everything is done in-house: from stitching, designing, cutting, developing the patterns, logistics and even content creation.
While the business has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception, 2020 was the first period in which revenue dropped. She notes that the business survived during this season by stitching reusable masks.
“That year, we made over one million reusable masks,” she states. “It was very little profit, but it allowed us to keep the lights on. We managed not to let go of a single person. But it was tough. Since then, I don’t feel like things have calmed down; it is like it has been one thing after another.”
And this is the reason Gichuru insists on the need for an entrepreneur to always keep learning. She says she read Atomic Habits for the same reason. Then read Reset by Dan Heath for her business.
“This year, I am doing things I never did before because I understood what it takes to put the right habits into place and make them stick. I am in the gym four times a week; I am getting off some of my addictions to the phone and all those things,” she says.
“Reset helps you do that for your business. Your business needs good habits just as much as your personal life.”