Long before Hingees became one of Nigeria’s most recognisable apparel brands, it was simply Hammed Okunade experimenting with his creative curiosities. More than a decade later, that experiment has grown into a business with a fiercely loyal community and customers around the world. Piggyvest spoke to Hammed about building brands that people identify with, learning entrepreneurship on the job, and growing ethically.
This year, Hingees clocks 11 years of operations. How are you processing this milestone?
I think it’s pretty wild to consider it. I’m still processing the fact that we celebrated our 10th anniversary last year. Hingees was a creative outlet for me to express my creative curiosities. At the time, I was getting burnt out at work and needed a passion project outside of client work. I didn’t realise it would grow into what it is today. I’m still soaking it all in.
Before you started Hingees, you were a graphic designer. How did you get into graphic design?
Can I say graphic design was accidental?
My journey in tech actually started with coding. Immediately after secondary school, my father enrolled me in a computer school to learn systems and network engineering because he knew I was interested in computers and didn’t want me sitting idle at home.
It was there that I met a guy who was learning desktop publishing using tools like CorelDRAW and the Adobe Suite. Whenever he had assignments, he would ask me for advice on fonts and design & before long, we started a knowledge exchange. I stumbled on web design in CorelDRAW and doubled down on that as a side interest.
Another friend, who noticed my interest in web design, connected me with a tutor who took me on as an apprentice and taught me the basics. Over the next two years, I learned HTML and began coding in Notepad++ and Dreamweaver.
Interesting.
I know, right? Over time, though, I began to enjoy graphic design more than I enjoyed coding. I was very good at both, but this was before the tech boom in Nigeria, and not many clients wanted websites; they all wanted designs for logos, fliers, and other business assets.
Even the clients who commissioned me to build websites for their businesses often wanted additional assets, such as logos, letterheads, invoices, and business cards. Once I started designing business assets, clients started asking me to print for them. Luckily for me, I had a cousin in Shomolu, the printing district of Lagos, and I’d subcontract my printing work to him.
Printing business cards was my first exposure to seeing my work, which was mostly digital at the time, in person. It felt very surreal to design something on a computer and later hold it in your hand as a finished product.
Do you still design professionally?
Yes, I am still a designer. I am currently handling clients and actively taking on design projects.
How did the transition from freelancing into corporate work happen?
It’s sort of a miracle. I went to Lekki to deliver something to a client. On my way out, Chris Adiba stopped me and asked if I was a graphic designer because he was launching a startup and wanted me to work with him. I asked how he knew I was a graphic designer, and he said his spirit told him.
I was making, on average, ₦50,000 – ₦100,000 per design gig , so I wasn’t sold on paid employment, where they would likely pay me less for more work. He took my number anyway and called me at 6 am two days later to persuade me to, at least, interview for the job later that day. I went for the interview, and he hired me on the spot. The company was an e-commerce store called Adiba, and I was the company’s first graphic designer.
A year into my role at Adiba, I received an email from Hello Food (now Jumia Food) inviting me to an interview. They were hiring for the Head of Design for the African market, and someone had sent my CV and recommended me to Charles Gibson, the country manager at the time.
We had a very informal interview; I took a test and was hired. It was there that things really took off for me.
You were self-taught up until this point; how did you keep improving your skills in this new phase?
On the technical side, I used Behance and a couple of other platforms to submit my work for design feedback and learn from other designers. Working with the head designers at Hello Food in Berlin and accessing paid opportunities to upskill at the O2 Academy also helped.
On the business side, I had a couple of mentors, including Adekunle Gold, Uche Ugo, Daniel Emeka and a host of others who were moderators of the Naija Graphic Designers group on Facebook. It was on this forum that young designers like me were able to receive mentorship and feedback on managing clients in a company and as entrepreneurs.
Is that where you got the idea for Hingees?
Hingees started while I was at university, but I didn’t launch it until I was at Jumia Food. I met Kayode Olowu, who currently runs an agency, One Wild Cat. I was introduced to him at a retreat where I went to improve my design skills. Kayode ran a company called Print Meet that handled massive print jobs for Kenny Ogungbe of Kennis Music. He was my introduction to apparel design and production, and I was fascinated that people were paying to wear his designs. Olowu introduced me to his printing plug and showed me the ropes of selling to clients.
It gave me an opportunity to apply everything I have learned designing and building brands for clients and studying great brands like Nike and Coca-Cola to building a brand that could connect with people.
My bosses really supported me when I launched and even became my first clients.
Running a business is a different skill. How did you learn that side of things?
I’m very grateful for YouTube. I watched a ton of YouTube videos and did a lot of research to understand the process of making and selling. It also helped that I was at Jumia, which is primarily an e-commerce company, and had friends I could ask questions about setting up an e-commerce website that could handle end-to-end sales, calculate profit margins, and run a business efficiently.
Interestingly, Paystack launched around that time, and a friend referred me to Shola Akinola of Paystack; he facilitated the integration of a Paystack checkout for Hingees.
How did Hingees develop a strong identity and community around its products?
Before Hingees, my friends would call me a ‘motivational designer’. I was exposed to popular business books by my dad, and I used to design BlackBerry Messenger display pictures inspired by those books. People connected with it, and that eventually shaped the brand when I started it.
I didn’t even have values written down, but I knew I wanted my brand to be worn by go-getters. My T-shirts were conversation starters because they conveyed my customers’ values before they even spoke. It was a form of social proof for them, and they were my first advertisers.
The first group of people that really adopted Hingees was companies like Andela and Capital Square. We were always shipping shirts to 235 Ikorodu Road. 11 years later, I still have people from that original group who still regularly shop Hingees.
Someone expressed it clearly in a tweet when he said, ‘Are you even a tech bro if you don’t wear Hingees?’
How does tapping into communities like that help a business like Hingees scale through its first few years?
We use Paystack, so we have been able to track our growth from inception through their dashboards. Interestingly, the data shows that Hingees took off in 2021, a year after we introduced sweatpants.
Our first batch of 45 sweatpants sold out in 2 weeks. Our second batch of 150 pieces sold out in 3 weeks. When we did some research on global sweatpants sales, we noticed there was an uptick during and after COVID. We were uniquely positioned to benefit from this because we already had an identity that connected with tech people who were the core work-from-home crowd, and a product they needed.
That year, we grew revenue by 6x compared to 2020, and Hingees finally grew beyond my circle of friends and acquaintances and started shipping globally.
This is interesting because the Covid period was devastating for small businesses, and your moment came after Covid. How did you sustain the business up until that breakthrough in 2021?
To be honest, I didn’t have a formula; I was even working full-time to supplement my income. But as a brand designer, I have always had it at the back of my mind that brand building is a very slow process, but when it is properly done, the compounding effect is insane. The goal for me was just to keep making.
At the centre of Hingees were certain values: design and the joy of making. It remains the same for me today. I wanted to build a brand that impacts people, and I have heard community stories that validate this, like the Hingees customer who went to a bank to do a transaction and a teller recognised his wallet was from Hingees and went out of his way to personally oversee his transaction. Stories like that fuel me beyond Hingees’ financial bottom lines.
How has your approach to pricing evolved over the years?
The truth is Hingees’ products are underpriced. I discovered this recently when we hired our first accountant in 2022 because I was around business leaders seeking their input on scaling our business and saw a need to get serious about our finances.
Getting a comprehensive financial report showed we were not doing badly, but we were not optimised to run as an efficient business. I used to think of profit margins in hard percentages, but I did not consider the invisible costs, such as marketing and operational costs, in our pricing. Even considering our economy and the purchasing power of our market, our pricing is still much lower than what we can comfortably ask of our customers.
Running a business is different from pursuing a passion project; to scale, we have to be efficient and think through all our margins properly. I had to hire a growth person recently to handle our marketing because we need to hack our way into expanding our market. I’m educating myself a lot more and even considering an MBA.
You also run a faith-based business, Dhikr, that builds on the principles of community and inspiration, but focused on faith. What inspired that journey?
Dhikr started from the BlackBerry days. I used to design digital daily devotional posters featuring verses from the Qur’an and the Hadith during Ramadan. For me, this was just a way to use my skills as a way to express my faith, but these devotionals were shared globally. I would get random messages from people all around the world about how they helped people.
At some point in 2018, I went through a rough patch personally and professionally; even Hingees suffered, and I had to refund clients. That period made me revisit those posters in a new medium. Some scriptures discourage Muslims from having photos of animate objects in the home, and I saw this as an opportunity to create artwork inspired by scripture that could serve a dual purpose: beautifying the home and expressing our faith. I made the first poster for a friend, got great feedback and set up the business. We started with posters and expanded to postcards, which was a big hit with students.
The beautiful thing is that I didn’t have to do much marketing. Sermons from the Imams during Juma’at services already delve deeply into many of the ideas we feature in our Dhikr posters. I didn’t need to keep inventory, unlike Hingees, and I had a ready-built customer base because religion is very sentimental. It was a low-effort, high-reward business venture that was also aligned with my values.
Dhikr posters became a global brand before Hingees, even though Hingees started first and takes a lot more effort to run. Do you feel resentful that Hingees has not attained the same level of success?
Resentment is something I think about a lot, because Hingees stresses me so much. But a lot of my discipline, training, and product development that have made Dhikr so successful come from Hingees. It would interest you to know that Dhikr invests heavily in Hingees. There are many times when Hingees is cash-strapped, and we get cash flow from Dhikr because it doesn’t have any revenue tied up in inventory.
So I wouldn’t say I feel resentful, but I always worry that Hingees haven’t caught up to Dhikr. But I appreciate that Hingees is in a more competitive market, while Dhikr appeals to faith, a more powerful motivator for our customers. I’ve come to accept that Hingees is a training ground for me and has time to grow.
Hingees has given me a lot of social capital; I’ve gotten brand consultations and adjacent projects as a result. We started a brand called Blank Tribe from Hingees that handles bulk t-shirt orders for businesses like Andela, Tech Cabal, Cowrywise, and Sparkle. We had to shut down the business due to other constraints, but it existed because of Hingees’ brand equity.
A decade of operations requires true resilience as a founder/entrepreneur. What processes have become essential to the success of your brands?
Accounting.
I didn’t have an insight into how numbers affect our business until I hired an accountant. Seeing a breakdown of what we are spending on things like photography reframed how we spend at Hingees. We started thinking about the mechanics of balancing our business, our best-performing products in terms of margins and designing sales funnels.
What are your non-negotiables for long-term financial growth as an entrepreneur?
Quality control and customer obsession are non-negotiables for me. I strongly believe that the happiest customers are the best advocates for a business. Our best customers have come from recommendations from other customers.
We had a pop-up recently, and a customer told us he bought a dope kit for a friend years back, and the friend was still using the dope kit. Unfortunately, that means that person will not come back to buy another dope kit because the one he has works. We focus so much on making quality products, and the downside of that is we continually have to look for new customers because our products last so long. The good part is that we get very good word-of-mouth recommendations.
Hiring is another non-negotiable for me. I’m very grateful for friends because I struggled with hiring for a time and things kept falling through the cracks. I remember having a conversation with a friend, Fu’ad Lawal, about hiring quality people, and he made me write out our company values. I ended up with 7 values, including taste, and I baked them into our hiring process. Since then, we have been able to filter the best staff. I don’t take these things for granted.
Muslim business owners must follow certain Islamic guidelines that dictate how to manage savings and investments, and businesses need both to grow. How do you future-proof your business while adhering to the dictates of your faith?
It is hard in this environment, and I have spoken about it recently. What has really helped is the power of networks and community. I have investors in Hingees, mostly family and friends who share the same values. We’ve not raised a lot of capital, but I reckon that when we get to that stage, it might be a bit challenging.
We have certain organisations that fund businesses for a certain percentage of profits in line with Shari’a guidelines. I haven’t explored those options, but I have access to them. For now, we are good on capital; my community shows up for me.
What advice do you have for other Muslim business owners who generate significant revenue and want to save and invest that extra income in line with Shari’a guidelines?
Personally, I do that. There is a lot of information online, and there are people who have already figured this out. A friend recently showed me how he used AI to think through ethical investing in the capital markets. I would suggest researching instruments designed to comply with Shari’a guidelines. Many fintech apps, like Piggyvest, offer features that help you save ethically, including interest-free savings options and ethical investments.
I also advocate for investing your profits back into your business to scale. Don’t just take your profits out; use it to grow.
What financial tips would you like to share with other young entrepreneurs who are balancing careers and businesses?
Two things: leveraging the power of networks and starting lean.
One of the things we did in our early days was to leverage our network across different industries by offering a service swap for things we couldn’t afford, instead of money. Hingees did this in our early days. Our first photoshoot was a service swap with a photographer friend who needed a logo. I actually wrote an essay on all my friends in my network who helped in Hingees’ journey; shout-out to Abdulrahman Jogojogo, a marketing lead at Paystack who often helped us review our strategy in our early days.
When you are starting out, you won’t have the financial capacity to hire many people, so you will wear a lot of hats. Even if you should, hiring before you are ready will strain your finances. To be efficient, you need to understand every aspect of your business, so when you eventually start hiring, you’ll have clarity on the role you want to fill and a better grasp of how to negotiate salaries and determine workload.
Where do you see Hingees in the next decade?
During our 10th anniversary celebrations, I told my team that one philosophy I want us to carry into the next decade is to dare to do things.
I don’t have a detailed plan, but what I do know is that 10 years from now, we will still define success by making meaningful things and building a community around those things. Whether we are in Nairobi, Morocco, or Tokyo, all well and good, as long as we are still learning and making.
I just want to keep the joy of making alive, and as long as that is there, I believe we will continue to grow as a brand.
