We’ve all heard of the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ well it also takes a village to build a business! Along our journey, there have been countless amounts of people who have helped us get to where we are today. It’s never easy starting a business, and if we didn’t have the extra support of our family and friends, it would have been 100x harder.

At the very beginning of Grass-fields, we came across a hurdle. We needed to figure out how to get our clothes on a reputable platform in order to expand our reach. We decided on Etsy but now we had the bigger problem of collecting payment. We couldn’t set up a Paypal from Cameroon so we had to think of something else. One of my friends, who is still a dear friend of mine till this day, let us use her Paypal to collect payment and every week or so, she would send us the money via Western Union.

However, there was always a withdrawal limit per account. We used my mum’s account, my brother’s, anyone we could find that would be willing to help. We would all go to the different branches frantically to collect the money to buy the stock we needed. Everything was pre-order only so we didn’t have stock ready to go like we do now.

Looking back, I feel so much immense gratitude for everyone who helped us. If I’ve learnt one thing from life it’s that no one owes you any help, but those who go out of their way and sometimes inconvenience themselves to do so, are gems and you should always appreciate them. Although we no longer have to operate like we once did, we still have a strong sense of community and some of our family members work for the Grass-fields team full time.