We found the right investor – and business grew four-fold

Sandy founders Patrick Sigilai and Sellah Sigowo. 09/08/2019. (Jenipher Wachie, Standard)

The problem

One evening in 2013, Patrick Sigilai’s twin daughters, Sandra and Samantha, came home with a time-sensitive request.

“They had piles of exercise books that needed to be covered before morning,” he says.

Both Patrick and his wife Stellah Sigowo were tired and exhausted from work. Yet, they had no choice but to rush to a supermarket, buy paper rolls, go back to the house and spend a long night covering their daughters’ exercise books.

The light-bulb moment

Finally done but exhausted, Patrick had a crazy thought.

“I looked at my wife and said, ‘This could be a business idea'. After the night we’d had, I knew I’d pay to get someone do the covering for me.”

In the morning, the idea wouldn’t give Patrick peace, so he designed a book cover on cardboard to make work easier for him the next time the girls came home with a similar request.

With the cardboard cut-out, it was easier to come up with paper cover models. Patrick then shared these covers with some neighbours and they loved them.

“I got people asking for more pieces, and with each positive review, my confidence that we were onto something grew,” he says. So Patrick developed further designs for A4 and A5-sized exercise and textbooks.

First major sale

Patrick then approached Jua Kali artisans to produce a machine that could cut copies from the cardboard prototype.

“We took a few samples to a bookshop in Nakuru. On our way back from the bookshop, we met a friend from Kabarak Primary School, showed him what we were doing, and he invited us to a meeting at the institution,” Stellah says.

They pitched the book covers and sold every single piece they had carried.

“It was our first major sale,” Stellah says, and from that point on, they were in business.

Sandy East Africa (named after Sandra, one of the couple’s twin girls) was born. Patrick approached a few schools in Nakuru – where the family lived – leading to impressive sales.

Business challenges

Neither Patrick nor Stellah had run a business before, though. And as expected, they ran into headwinds.

Their main challenge was how to scale their idea without a distribution network.

“You can produce, but then if you don’t have a way of getting the product to the mass market, you won’t sell,” Patrick says.

Further, the paper-cutting machine could only put out so many covers in a day. And they didn’t have money for further investments.

And then last year, the third season of the KCB Lions’ Den show made a call for applications. Patrick and Stellah decided to throw their hat in the ring and see what could come from the business reality show that airs on KTN.

It turned out better than they had dared to hope. Sandy EA drew the interest of Darshan Chandaria, the CEO of the Chandaria Group of Companies and an investor on the show.

“Darshan bought 33 per cent of our business for Sh5 million,” Patrick says.

This was the couple’s big break. They’d previously approached banks for loans but had been turned away on the grounds that their business was still in the start-up phase.

1,000 cartons

The partnership with Darshan Chandaria bolstered the business and sent it soaring to mid-level company levels within no time.

“He was the right investor. He has a nationwide distribution network and he also provided the capital that saw us grow,” Patrick says.

Beyond investment, Patrick acknowledges that he and Stellah have benefitted from incredible mentorship from Darshan.

“The Lions on the show have unmatched wisdom in running businesses, and their insights are invaluable.”

Among the skills Patrick has gained from partnering with Darshan, he says, are financial management, self-discipline and product costing.

Owing to that partnership Sandy’s exercise book covers are now available in stores countrywide.

Patrick and Stellah have since outsourced the production of the covers, moving away from their slow Jua Kali-fabricated machine.

Today, the business sells at least 1,000 cartons, each holding hundreds of Sandy book covers, a month.  

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