By Ebunoluwa Sessou

Demi Samande is the Managing Director of Majeurs Holdings, a company with high-profile clientele. She has extensive knowledge of manufacturing & running a business first-hand as a young startup founder.
She is the founder of Majeurs Holdings and SUSU Studios, two ventures combining her passion for furniture making, design, architecture, and entrepreneurship. With over 12 years of experience in leading and scaling a luxury furniture manufacturing company based in the UK and Nigeria, she has created innovative and bespoke pieces for some of the most high-profile clients in both countries. She is also a certified leather and upholstery expert, a guest lecturer at Stanford School, and a Interior Designers Association of Nigeria (IDAN) member.
She wrote a book called: In Her Hands: Shaping the Future of Manufacturing in Africa: A Woman’s Story. In this interview, she speaks on the opportunities embedded in manufacturing which Nigeria as a nation, can explore to create a value chain for young people.
The book highlights her inspiring journey as a trailblazer in Africa’s manufacturing sector and explores themes of women empowerment, sustainability, and innovation.

The journey

Majeurs Holdings is a company that has been in existence for the past 14 years. We started up in the United Kingdom before coming to Nigeria in 2016 and we have been pushing the business. I was 12 years old when I started as an entrepreneur in the United Kingdom and I have managed two different businesses. It has been 14 years on the journey.

Today, I have managed to document the journey in a book called: ‘In Her Hand: Shaping the Future of Manufacturing in Africa: A Woman’s Story’.

I am a manufacturer and I started manufacturing in 2010. I started as a Furniture Restorer which I would put back in the market. It was a successful business. Furniture Restoration was what gave birth to Majeurs Holdings. At Majeurs Holdings, we make furniture choosing local resources and local talents in Nigeria.

Having been in Nigeria for the past eight years, we manufacture furniture for local consumption as well as exporting from Nigeria to the US, UK, East Africa, Australia, among others.

Manufacturing furniture using local talent, resources as much as we can and shipping our value added products to a global market are a very important endeavour to me.
Taking what you have and deriving value from what seems to be valueless and making it available to the global market that is willing to pay for it, is fundamental to me as a person. And this is what led me to starting the business here. Taking what Nigeria has and pushing the agenda of value added products. How can we create value out of our natural resources? That ideology is what also led me to starting the academy. We have a training academy.

We learned very early in our journey that it is very difficult to produce anything of value when people have not been given the resources to train and to learn how to transform raw materials into something that is valuable.

We started training as early as 2017 after realising that there is a deficiency between where I am trying to get to and what is on ground. So, we started training. Over the last eight years, we have been training and it was during COVID-19 that I realised that there is a huge amount of value to derive from taking our training very seriously. There have been many people who have established their businesses after five years of undergoing our training.

They have great transformation in their personal lives. I have gained an immense amount of value from personal development to financial benefits and to be exposed to wealth that I would not have experienced if I had not started as an entrepreneur. I really want to share that with people in Nigeria and the world at large.

I believe it is important to continue to share this journey, not because we are perfect or they are void of problems or challenges but simply because there is value to be added. I spoke on the importance of giving people the permission to be great and to understand that it is not easy but it is worth it and I see that in the lives of the young people who come to our academy. So, the last eight years has led me to penciling down my journey in the book.
For me, the academy has been the highlight of my career in the last 14 years. And it will be an accomplishment when I see young people talking about their journey.

I want this book to be a conversation starter about how we can no longer afford as a country to ignore manufacturing as a way to transform the lives of young people. If we want an environment that empowers young people and we are sincere about wanting a country that is self-sustaining and can compete with the global market, we cannot continue to ignore manufacturing as a way to create opportunity and prosperity.

I am a product of manufacturing and my prayer is to see young people coming into the industry because the industry cannot sustain itself. As a manufacturer, I have roadblock every day. We need support. The reason for the book is to initiate a conversation and pull in the stakeholders that have the power to make us achieve the goals.

There is a lot of wealth in manufacturing and lots to be gained in space. What we need is to develop a conversation to get to where we want to go.

The Book

I spent two-and-a-half years compiling the book and it reflects my journey in the last 14 years. The book is centred on manufacturing on the continent.

Summarize the book for a common man who is anxious and on the move…

There is an audio version of the book so someone on the move is not excluded from the journey. The book talks about entrepreneurship as a means to save you as an individual. It captures my story on how entrepreneurship has saved me and beyond just saving me; it speaks on how entrepreneurship in Africa can change the prosperity of a nation.

We have read stories of giants who have gone ahead of us, people who have gone through the process and have done extraordinarily well. We talked about how they achieved. So, the book focuses on how to survive in Africa, in business and genuinely in a terrain like this, in an environment that tells people that it is not possible.

Ultimately, it is about wanting to find a solution to life’s problems. Solution to business journey and some of the difficulties you are facing.

Africa has so many resources but we are not using them and we are not sincere about using them. We are leaving lots of opportunities and we are seeing our problems everyday manifesting in the lives of young people. We have the manufacturing, creative sector, resources and there are many resources we could put together in the manufacturing secctor that we begin to solve lots of all these problems.

It is frustrating to see that I have to get to Italy before I could buy raw materials for leather that we have raw skins for in Nigeria. We export our skin at a fraction of what other countries are paying for. We only count ourselves out of the global market by exporting our raw materials to Italy.

In my industry, it is very difficult for me to dry wood. Our woods have constantly been shipped out of the country every day to go into the production lines in other countries.
The majority of the Nigerian market cannot afford the real prices of production. The only way to be competitive is to start selling in the global market. It is a difficult conversation but it is the reality now. We have all the raw materials here yet, we are spending so much money to export it and bring it back. Instead of putting up the money to develop the raw materials for our local manufacturers.

We need to understand the value chain opportunities that have been lost. Inflation is on the increase as well as cost of living, we import what we are supposed to have made by ourselves. Every time somebody imports a finished product into the country, and it does not simultaneously invest in the materials of those products that were imported, we are doing ourselves an injustice.

Everything we are doing is to create opportunities for young people in our industry to be able to have the confidence to believe in us. The industry needs lots of help so that all of us can benefit.

What is the motive behind your relocation to Nigeria despite the challenges in manufacturing?

I have travelled enough to understand that there is trouble everywhere. There are issues in all the countries and Nigeria is not isolated. We were doing great in England. The first time I visited Nigeria, I was 14 years old and what I was able to see in the people was the hunger that existed that I had not seen growing up in England. It made me very curious. In England when my sister’s husband said I should go to Nigeria, I was skeptical, I knew nothing about Nigeria. But, when I came as an adult and I saw things from an adult point of view, I saw so many opportunities that I have never seen. I came and did a feasibility study about Nigeria and I saw the gaps and explored them. I was impressed about the outlook because we managed to create something out of nothing. When we saw the market gap, I decided to explore it.

Overcoming the challenges along the line….
I would not say women’s challenges are unique to men’s challenges. There are aspects of both but not necessarily insurmountable. But, I think, women in entrepreneurship have gotten to a point where we are not paying attention. We are not focusing on those challenges. The problems I have are the same as the men.

Sometimes, when people walk into my office, they expect to see a man but after engaging for five minutes, they are assured of doing business with us.

What has sustained you for eight years?

The first virtue is my tenacity. I refused to give up. I did not want to fail and I had to build up the muscle. At 12 years, I have had experience as an entrepreneur and I built resilience. I also want to see Nigeria win. This is the opportunity we have to grab to be on the global market. Manufacturing has been seen to be the change agent of many countries, so, it is not out of place to replicate the same in Nigeria.

Are you saying that if Nigeria focuses on manufacturing, it will boost the economy?

Absolutely! Other nations are doing it. If the nations do not have access to raw materials, then they will need to come to Nigeria and that is the value we get when we manufacture. If we have value added materials that are useful in production, then they will buy it. This means that we are making and keeping the money in our country and we are in the position to control the pricing of what we are producing.

I am curious to know why Nigeria has suddenly delisted herself from the manufacturing group of nations. Nigeria used to export in the past and we were making the revenue from that. Why can’t we do that now?