What furniture taught me about failing forward

Cindy Wanjiku is a psychology graduate who found herself running a furniture business quite by chance.

She hadn’t ever thought of making furniture, but perhaps it wasn’t too far off from where she started: making clothes.

The beginning

Cindy joined USIU after high school to study psychology. She’d always loved clothes, and got the idea to start making them for people. She started an Instagram page to market her creations.

As she studied, she kept up with her fashion hustle, and then in her second year of campus, Cindy decided to study fashion part-time at Mcensal School of Fashion and Design. The plan was to put together a fashion show.

“In the middle of all this, I developed a love for spaces. I’d enter a space and immediately see what I would improve and what I’d like to change. I’d cut out pictures from weekend magazines for inspiration,” she says.

“I ended up in the furniture business when I wanted to re-do my bedroom. I’d really saved up for it and knew what I wanted it to look like.”

However, it turned out that the amount she’d saved up wasn’t enough to even buy a bed.

‘‘I felt like this wasn’t right; why was it so expensive to furnish a space? So I decided to research the costs of everything, from labour to materials like fabric and plywood.”

The carpenter she worked with had initially charged her Sh10,000 for a small table, for instance. In the course of her research, she realised it cost him just Sh1,000 to make it.

Cindy found herself on an intense learning curve and picking up new lessons on failing forward – the idea of learning through trial and error – on a daily basis.

“I would travel deep into various markets and still end up with materials that were more expensive than what the average carpenter had,” she says.

Cindy realised she wasn’t going to make the bed she so badly wanted by casually dipping into the furniture business.

She’d picked up a lot of information, and with her background in fashion and design, she knew she could offer people something different.

During her evening commute, she’d see a shop space along Kiambu Road. It was empty for three months before Cindy finally decided to give the furniture business a chance and called up the landlord.

She started off paying Sh30,000 in rent, but after the surrounding area got tenants, her landlord lowered prices.

The challenges

Her plan in the beginning was to just start, so she approached furniture shops in the vicinity offering to sell their items, and she’d add a mark-up.

No one agreed.

“I’m glad that route didn’t work out because I would not have learnt what I know today. I would still be complacent as a broker,” she adds.

Despondent, Cindy approached her uncle who sold curios and Maasai shukas to help her stock her shop while she figured things out.

She started spraying lanterns and running other DIY projects that she’d sell at Sh300. She kept this up for two months.

The only reasons her business stayed afloat, she says, was that she’d paid her rent in advance.

Her first breakthrough came when a carpenter agreed to make beds and sell them to her at Sh40,000 and she could then sell them on at Sh50,000.

However, she ended up meeting the man’s fundi and two years later, they’re still working together. Today, she sells that bed at Sh32,000.

The fundi additionally told her where to go for foam and fabric, where to find tailors for buttoning, and great sources of wood.

However, this partnership didn’t magically make everything perfect. The first bed Cindy made stayed out on display for days on end and ended up discoloured.

She soon discovered she’d become part of the problem she’d been trying to solve. Her beds were too expensive at Sh50,000, so she made some changes.

Finding success

Cindy’s first sale was of a red bed that had a tufting design on both the footboard and headboard, and it cost Sh32,000. Today, that design goes for Sh10,000.

“I made furniture for one person in a chama, and two people from the same chama ended up being my clients. I grew more and more, and started marketing my work on social media, especially Instagram. It became very instrumental to my growth.”

In June last year, she moved out of her Kiambu Road site after the building was shut down.

Cindy moved into her mother’s compound, but despite not having to pay rent, the space wasn’t a workshop and the mess her business made was destructive. Six months later, she found her current work space in Kasarani.

Making it stick

“Working in a customer-based industry is difficult because everyone is different. There are good days and bad days,” says Cindy.

“The number one problem is when customers come with photos from the Internet and want you to replicate something. The item happens to be imported and was made by machines with very expensive materials, but the client expects the finished, locally made product to look exactly the same.”

And despite the support she’s received from family and friends, she still gets asked by some when she’s getting a ‘real’ job, despite drawing an average income of Sh150,000 a month from making furniture and creating jobs for six people.

“I still use my degree, though, by volunteering with the It’s Not Over support group and a haemophilia support group at Kenyatta National Hospital. I plan to start my master’s degree in September and specialise in abnormal psychology.”

And when it comes to her business, Cindy hopes to expand over the next five years, beginning with Mombasa where she already has clients she makes deliveries to. And she’s finally building the bed that started it all.

“We all grow up knowing a side hustle is just that – something you do on the side. But for me, I love my hustle. I would never give it up for anything.”