Luxury weddings look beautiful. Running the business behind them is another story.

Naitore Mugambi, founder of Luxe & Allure Events, joins Alma to talk about the reality of building one of Kenya's luxury events businesses.

She shares the story of losing KES 600,000 of startup capital to theft, raising the money again, navigating the breakup of an early business partnership and eventually building Luxe & Allure with her husband.

They also get into the numbers behind the business: investing millions in tents and equipment, how long it can take to recover that investment, constant reinvestment, losses and damages, pricing pressure and competition in an industry without clear standards.

Naitore talks honestly about the hardest part of the business today: trying to build a company that can operate without her, while maintaining the level of personal service and creativity her clients expect.

It's a conversation about entrepreneurship, partnerships, operations, money, creativity and what it actually takes to make a beautiful business work behind the scenes.

This is So, How’s Business?

What's the difference between believing in an idea and knowing how to build it?

The founder of Braiding Nairobi found out the hard way. A journalist by training, she came to Nairobi for a National Geographic storytelling fellowship, noticed how many skilled braiders struggled to find clients in a city where nearly every woman pays regularly for her hair, and decided to stay and solve it. Then she spent two years learning that most of her first instincts were wrong.

In this conversation she's refreshingly honest about the parts founders usually hide: launching to silence, the survey that proved demand, and the tiny WhatsApp button that ended up driving most of her orders. She talks through her decision to go to business school a year in, why she's grown disillusioned with VC funding, and the reality of running a business she can pay her team from but not yet herself.

It's also a sharp look at a market that's obvious to Black women and invisible to the investors holding the cheque book, and what it takes to keep going when the honest answer to "should I keep doing this?" is still unfolding.

A candid one for anyone weighing a pivot, questioning whether business school is worth it, or sitting in the messy middle of building.

What does it actually take to walk away from a stable government job, twice, for a creative career nobody around you fully believes in?

Neema is a model, content creator, and the owner of Flora by Florence, a Nairobi boutique. But before any of that, she was sitting in a government office feeling something in her go quiet. This episode traces the messy, honest path out: a spa that failed on location, a modeling side hustle that grew from 5,000 shillings a gig to a real income in a matter of months, and a mother who insisted her daughter open her own store.

Neema loves the creative work. It is the thing that makes her feel alive. But she also knows modeling has an expiry date, and the business that lasts is the one she has to choose to focus on, even when it is the less fun option.

This is a conversation about choosing yourself, pricing your worth, and the quiet cost of giving everything to work. If you have ever wondered whether the leap is worth it, listen in.

Disclaimer This episode includes personal reflections on money, business decisions, and income. It is shared for context and storytelling and is not financial or business advice.

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After losing her job while seven months pregnant, Angel Nderitu entered motherhood carrying uncertainty about her finances, her future, and what came next. When her breast milk supply changed unexpectedly after giving birth during the COVID-19 pandemic, she began searching for answers through nutrition, traditional foods, herbs, and lactation support.

That personal experience eventually became LactaMama, a Kenyan maternal wellness company supporting mothers through breastfeeding nutrition, education, lactation support, and compassionate postpartum care.

In this episode of So, How’s Business?, Alma Mabachi speaks with Angel about the realities of breastfeeding, building a business while raising young children, and navigating the pressure many women face to succeed professionally while caring for everyone around them.

Angel shares practical insights on nutrition, hydration, rest, maternal wellbeing, and accessible foods that mothers may already have in their kitchens. She also discusses building a women-led team, managing the rising costs of manufacturing, asking for help, and learning to give herself more grace.

This is not only a conversation about breast milk supply. It is about motherhood, ambition, identity, community, and what happens when women are expected to recover, achieve, care for others, and make it all look effortless.

Because when a child is born, a mother is born too.

Shamim Quresh is the founder of Koro Gaia, an African skincare brand built around African botanicals and research for melanated skin. She talks about the realities of manufacturing in Kenya, including 60 to 70% tax on imported inputs, what happened when funding stopped and she shut the business down in 2023, and how third-party manufacturing helped her generate income while rebuilding. She also shares why founders need to ask more questions, even when they feel like “dumb” questions, and her vision for African beauty.

Lorna Joyce has lived several lifetimes in one. She lost her father, her brother, and her mother before she was 18 — and found herself caretaking, surviving, and building from scratch while most people her age were still figuring out what they wanted to be. That foundation of loss, faith, and raw determination is what eventually gave birth to Binti Marvels, one of Kenya's most purpose-led femcare brands.

In this episode, Lorna takes us through all of it: the 100,000 pads she brought in with almost no capital and sold shop-to-shop from a van, the investor who pulled out and forced a full shutdown, the 30 employees she had to let go, and the therapy that finally helped her process decades of grief and control. She also shares why she came back — with Mrembo, Kenya's first locally manufactured pad designed explicitly for the African woman. If you've ever had to pause something you love and wondered whether to go back, this one is for you.

What happens when you come back home and the thing your daughter needs simply doesn't exist?

You build it.

Grace Muritu is the founder of Elite Gymnastics Academy in Nairobi. A former pediatric nurse who returned to Kenya after 12 years in the US and created a competitive gymnastics training facility from scratch. No blueprint. No investors. Just land she was willing to sell and a vision she couldn't let go of.

This week on So, How's Business?, the real story behind Elite Gymnastics. The build, the coaches, the children, and the Olympic dream she's quietly working towards.

So, How's Business? is a weekly podcast documenting African women entrepreneurs — the real experiences, hard lessons, and the stories behind the business. New episodes every Tuesday.

Dr. Faith Wambura Ngunjiri is a certified Impostor Syndrome Informed Coach, Emotional Intelligence Practitioner, and leadership scholar with a Doctorate in Leadership Studies. She spent over two decades as a tenured professor in the United States before burnout, racial bias, and a heart attack brought her home.

In Episode 21, Dr. Faith and Alma go deep on the real cost of imposter syndrome for African women, not just the emotional cost, but the financial one. The promotions we didn't go for. The tenders we didn't apply for. The businesses we kept small. The apartments we gave up without knowing it.

They cover the five types of imposter syndrome, why the distortion of competence is the most accurate definition, whether women really experience it more than men, and what the $42 billion financing gap for African women has to do with self-doubt. Dr. Faith also shares her own story- from the village in central Kenya to a university in Minnesota, through divorce, racism, burnout, and a heart attack- and what it finally took to come home and thrive.

This is one of the most honest conversations on the show yet.

Find Dr. Faith:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drfaithngunjiri/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faithngunjiri/

Nominate a guest: https://shorturl.at/S0zue

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Ritu Bahal built a 37-year career in corporate Kenya beforeleaving to solve a problem she'd lived for decades. Her company KPM Tech makes Trackright, a logistics platform that gives trucking businesses real-time visibility across every stage of a delivery. The pitch sounds simple. The problem is massive: 90% of African truckers are non-digitised, and logistics costs account for 40% of what goods cost on Kenyan shelves.

In this conversation, Ritu talks about rising from bookkeeper to CEO, getting fired while pregnant from her first job, an arranged marriage she negotiated on her own terms, and what it's really like walking into investor rooms as an experienced woman founder. Candid, sharp, and not pulling any punches.

Melanie Hapisu- Wambugu is the founder and CEO of Digipath Africa, a digital marketing agency based in Kenya. In five years she has built a client list that includes some of Kenya's largest corporations, trained hundreds of business owners and marketers, and figured out how to run a business from Muranga without losing a single client.

This episode covers a lot of ground. We talk about how she lands large corporate clients through cold outreach, her exact process, step by step. We talk about the year one client accounted for 60% of her revenue and what that anxiety taught her about building a sustainable business. We talk about the moment she stopped giving free advice and started charging for everything, including 15-minute consultations, and how she had that conversation with friends who expected it for free.

We also get into digital strategy for small businesses and founders, why posting every day is not the answer, what the algorithm is actually doing, when paid ads work and when they're burning money, and the biggest mistakes she sees founders make with their online presence.

And then there's the story about the time her name trended on X for something that had nothing to do with her. That one is worth listening to alone.

Melanie is sharp, generous, and genuinely funny. This is one is a favourite.

Hosted by Alma. New episodes every week.