Old School Photo of Kingsway Department Store in Ibadan, Nigeria
Hello and Welcome to my newest blog.
Take a look around to explore all the goodies that will appear on this blog today and in upcoming features and updates about the Barber/Oloye Mattress and Home Furnishing Company Ltd that is located in Ibadan, Nigeria.
I will be discussing business sense as it relates to American wanting to open a business in Nigeria and overall in Africa. In 1972, I conceived of an idea to start up a company in Nigeria for mattresses and home furnishings. I got angry and tired of seeing Nigerians go to furniture stores in Chicago, my hometown and skipping out on the bills they were leaving behind to the detriment of the retailer, our citizens, and ultimately to our society. Therefore, I made it my duty when I travelled to Nigeria in 1974 that I would research mattresses and furniture retailers in Ibadan, Nigeria. The first store I researched was Kingsway. I looked around carefully writing down the prices of mattresses, sofas, and other home furnishings. I was shocked to see how expensive the furniture was selling for. Hence, that would constitute some of the "getting furniture on credit and running off from the bill" that Nigerians were perpetrating all over the United States. Albeit what these people were doing was highly illegal, I found their motivation behind the madness of skipping out, and shipping out their (furnishings) via Lagos, Nigeria to remoter places in Nigeria.
Kingsway and Leventis Department Stores were the only retailers/department stores that sold European style furniture in 1974 in Ibadan. Moreover, at that time, the only foam manufacturer in Nigeria was Vono Products in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigerians were not manufacturing foam for mattresses in the country from all I saw when I dreamed up the business in 1974; Vono was.
I will discuss more tomorrow
Reference
Wikipedia (n.d.). Anastasios George Levantis. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasios_George_Leventis.
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