Meeting The Members: Makafui Ayimey
Workshed spotlights an industrious member of our community, Mr Makafui Ayimey, the dashing founder of the Accra Goods Market, a company which creates a platform for fine food purveyors, fashion and lifestyle brands and individuals to showcase their wares. The market provides an avenue for new product launches or brand engagement opportunities for SME’s. Three live events are held each year hosting a variety of vendors.
Makafui is an entrepreneur specialising in brand communications and marketing. He started the Accra Goods Market a year ago. While living in London, he was inspired by the several open markets where people go thrift shopping for food, drinks and vintage clothes. These markets were held in scenic places,by rivers and gardens, and the atmosphere, he says, is nice and relaxing. Makka, in a boost of energy and enthusiasm, felt inspired to establish such conducive markets in Ghana. Thus, the idea for Accra Goods Market was born.
He left Blu Telecommunications where he was employed because he was tired of the structure, working from 8am–5pm. He wanted to replicate what he saw in London here and started the market while still at Blu but quit after a year to focus on the market.
Every progressive venture comes with setbacks, and for Mr Ayimey and his newly founded Market, he faced some problems. The major issue was the fact that there were several fashion fairs already in existence. Accra Goods was seen as the newbies in the industry, with no track record, and much skepticism and lack of trust from prospective clients. He and his able partners, Jewie Djin and Evans Quianoo, had to rely heavily on who they knew. They had to make several calls to friends and family to get people to participate. Slowly, they built a network of friends and family, By the time they were ready to kickstart the first Accra Goods Market, they had about twenty-five vendors. Today, they don’t have to make so many — they keep receiving calls from several people who want to book stores, averaging about a hundred or more vendors per Market event. “Now we have arrived,” he says proudly, because people have seen the extent to which the market is patronised, and are rushing to book vendor space.
When asked what he does when he is not working, he says he is “always working”; he never rests. Although things are mostly falling in place nicely, he has to keep up the business support network he has created. The whole point of the market was to create an audience, so now that they have gotten the audience, the market feeds vendors with variety of other products and services — social media marketing, business consulting(business plans), access to finance (loans etc). There is a lot of work in looking for vendors and venues, almost as (if not more) time-consuming as the 8–5 business he left. Mr Maka doesn’t complain though, he loves it.
Apart from the Accra Goods Market, he runs an online marketing agency, which is his other interest. He once worked for SCANAD Ghana, as a head of digital marketing. He is passionate about showcasing businesses online and helping them to realise full potential of using online to market themselves.
What drives him is the thrill of being successful with a project, sitting back and knowing “Oh we could actually do that”. According to him, nothing beats that. A lot of people would come along and tell you its impossible, but he forges ahead. “You’re not even proving them wrong, you’re just proving yourself right. Whatever you believed in, you are able to accomplish it. That’s what pushes me.”
Makafui’s vision for his company is to have different markets in different parts of the world. He hopes to carry the market from Accra to Kumasi, to Takoradi, then to Jo’burg, to Durban, Angola, the UK and US, so in the long run, there will be Ghanaian vendors representing the Accra Goods Market in fairs globally.
One thing you wouldn’t immediately notice about Makka — he’s left handed, and believes this makes him gifted, smart, awesome and special. He gives examples of influential left-handed people: Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Gates. He boasts with a smirk that having such great left-handed people tells you that they are all good. He also takes great pride in being an “Odade3", from PRESEC Legon, attributing it to being playing a role in his success. Maka also worked in the admissions office of the Ashesi University for a while.
When he was younger, one of his mum’s older friends sent him a card which read, “Excellence is not a gift given, but a skill perfected.” His understanding of this was that you do not have to be inherent with a certain trait before you can exhibit it, just build it, and perfect it. The quote made him realise that if you’ve got a craft and you just keep at it, you’ll perfect it, and that way you will invariably become perfect at it. It’s his mantra.
#LetUsWork
