Top beauty professional SUZIE WOKABI founder of SuzieBeauty Cosmetics has established herself as a reputable brand that suits African skin. She shared with GARDY CHACHA her inspirational story
My dream career was to be a veterinary doctor but look at where I am — a beauty professional. I love cats and was under the delusion that being a vet meant playing with cute animals all day and not treating them for diseases. When I did an internship at my aunt’s vet clinic, the exposure made me change my mind.
That aside, I always loved make-up and beauty and even fantasised about having my own beauty product line. My girlfriends remind me that I would do their make-up in high school and college. So I guess working in the beauty industry was inevitable.
I also remember tweezing my own eyebrows at 13 and I have had groomed eyebrows ever since.
My journey as an entrepreneur began when I opted to take my freelance make-up services to another level and develop my product line. When I moved back home from the US in 2007, I came well-equipped with products to use. I realised that replenishing these products would be a problem since almost all beauty brands in Kenya are imported.
Affordable products
In Kenya, finding these products was either impossible or unaffordable. I decided to fill that gap in the market by creating a product that is high quality yet affordable. That’s what inspired me to start my company — SuzieBeauty, a beauty and cosmetics business.
Before I set camp, I spent three years on research and product development, looking for funding, mass manufacturing and launching into stores.
SuzieBeauty is the first locally designed beauty product line developed for the African woman by a beauty professional – myself.
The product line consists of nine products: foundation, powder, concealer, brush, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick and lip-gloss.
While in the USA, I took a job working for Clinique best known for skin care in New York, and they trained me from scratch. While Clinique is not a typical make-up line, it introduced me to the world of beauty.
I finally got my dream job working for MAC Cosmetics where I freelanced for many years. On the side I would work with photographers and models.
