A brief history of Adupo (part 2)
(This is part 2 of the history of Adupo, for part 1 see here)
So thanks to an introduction from Alison, we started working with Amanda in 2010. Shortly after, she gave birth to her daughter. I remember being shocked at the time because Amanda never seemed to slow down, either before or after Malika was born!
To begin with, we only ordered Maasai blankets through Amanda, mostly because they were by far the most popular item on the website. However we changed the business model in as much as the blankets were now shipped directly from Kenya instead of me (Keith) buying in bulk. Adupo is a hobby for me so I couldn’t afford to have funds tied up in stock, plus my room at the time wasn’t big enough to store the stock!
Amanda splits her time between Kenya and her native Canada so she trained a few of her associates in Kenya to send products when they were ordered. Unfortunately we had a few issues with the postal system so we had to start dealing with tracked shipping which is more expensive but at least customers can track the progress of their order.
Having seen the range of products that Amanda dealt with on her Facebook profile, we started discussing extending the range on Adupo. I knew firsthand about the quality of the products having ordered a couple of them as gifts. In February of this year, I decided to give the site a bit of an overhaul as it hadn’t changed since we originally launched it in 2007. I had learnt a bit about building sites on WordPress that are very cost effective so I decided to go down that route and it turned out that the new website was much more straight forward when it came to uploading products. This was the perfect time to add the new products and the result is what you see today.
So that’s a brief background to Adupo. And as for the future? Well, we hope to continue to build up Adupo to help with Amanda’s projects in Kenya. But we can definitely do with some help so please spread the word amongst family and friends.
PS. Keep an eye out for interviews with some of the key players to be posted over the next few weeks.
