Etiti Ayeni who is the founder and designer of ELUKE was presented with an opportunity and she made sure that at all costs she would be ready to deliver. Nothing in this life is given for free and ELUKE worked to make sure she was ready when the opportunity presented itself. What are you willing to do to take on your destiny and your purpose? In an interview with Etiti, she explains her creative inspirations and what led her to start her business.

What motivated you or inspired you to create your brand?

There are so many reasons honestly but I’ll focus on one. The things that inspired me to createELUKE has been a desire to kind of give the designs I have already been making a house. A place and an entity where they could exist and thrive and grow. Before I started ELUKE , I was designing jewelry but for myself mostly and I had the opportunity to be introduced to a collective of women, artists, and entrepreneurs in D.C. called Fem fatale DC. I would just wear my jewelry in there just because it was the type of space where you could show off and it was an inclusive space where it was women owned and women driven. I would wear my jewelry in there and people would just stop and say “oh, where did you get that jewelry from?” I would respond and say I made it and they would ask me “do you have a website?” and I’d say not yet I’m building it.

I was not building my website at the time and I don’t even think I’ve developed the name of the company. I was still thinking of names but being in that space kind of pushed me to formalize something that I felt proud of presenting to people. Instead of just saying oh I make this, I was just tired of telling people that I make jewelry but I’m not an artist or I make jewelry but I’m not an entrepreneur. It didn’t sit well with my soul.

It wasn’t just them that I felt I didn’t belong with necessarily but in general. I think truly deep down what inspired me to start my company was that it gave me the confidence to be the truest form of myself and not continue to shy away from that for a plethora of reasons.

It gave me a purpose in that I just wanted to be out there in a any way.  At the time, I didn’t know what that meant and people would told me “you know, you should get out there” and I would ask myself “what does that even mean?”

I didn’t even know where to begin but being in that space gave me the confidence to put myself in there. I had one woman in particular who told me about a vending opportunity and about a month later I was in that show….The event in D.C. was called Warehouse and it was at the Art Center. It was my first show ever and I had no inventory. When she was talking to me about the opportunity. At that moment, I scrambled for some business cards and to get a framework of my website up and I just used some fabulous old pictures that I had from my Birthday last summer.

Later, I ended up meeting my uber driver who was a photographer. I was wearing my jewelry and he told me they were nice and then he was a photographer. He is the first person that took my photos and those were the first photos I used to show  people my work which helped me get my foot in the door because allot of brands and businesses don’t have the materials that they need and those pictures were professional and also gave off the Solange and St. Heron aesthetic that I desired. It helped people look at my stuff and say she’s been in the game for a long time. I didn’t even have inventory before that show but I just got it together.

How do you design and what is your inspiration?

My boiler plate and what I put behind all my marketing is that the inspiration behind ELUKE is my Nigerian ancestry and my southern Gulla ancestry. So, I’m half Nigerian and my mother is Gullah-Geechee from South Carolina and they have a strong history in making materials out of baskets and doing a lot of different types of art projects. My aunt is a tapestry designer and so I’ve always drawn a lot of inspiration from textile and just the nature of weaving. My father used to dye fabric and I was just surrounded by all different types. My mom used to always take me to the fabric store. There was something very organic about being drawn to textile. I was drawn to that right away and I’ve been designing and creating jewelry since I was a kid. I got my first jewelry kit when I was probably 12. My aunt gave me a jewelry kit that had plyers and everything I needed.  She taught me the basics and I kind of just experimented. I don’t remember not having jewelry in my life or just creating jewelry or really working with DIYs like designing my shirts or ripping my jeans myself. I’ve always done that so I would just say the two things that I draw from is my Nigerian heritage and Gullah heritage as well as my family who are all creative.

However, a lot of the pieces that you see in the ELUKE collection  came from me experimenting with looks that I have conceived in my head. For example, I knew that I wanted a lot of gold and I can see myself being very regal and I wanted to wear a lot of high collar necklaces. So, I played around with things until I could come up with concepts that looked good on me specifically because with ELUKE I hadn’t intended on creating designs for other people and I always hoped I would but when I was creating at the time I kept thinking and imagining specific pieces looking great on different types of women. So, a lot of my creations is just a manifestation of creating things for myself, trial and error, and then creating renditions of another piece. In the past I’d never sketched because I liked being organic and a lot of the pieces I would make as a kid I’d make out of recycled jewelry parts. So, whatever I made was whatever I had at my disposal

What have you learned over time is a huge no? Like man, maybe I shouldn’t have done that?

Everything I’ve learned to date for me has been incredibly valuable. Whether or not I’ve misstepped or I’ve spent more money on something then I should have or didn’t source my materials correctly. All of the above is part of the growing that most brands probably have gone through and at least some of the ones I’ve researched have experienced the same ups and downs. So, I don’t really judge myself too harshly especially on some things that I have no control over. The one thing I did beat myself up over recently was allowing someone to haggle me on my price. I made that mistake twice and I will never make that mistake again. I can understand negotiations in the case of a  wholesaler or some other entity. However, I’m not there yet but I can make a business case for negotiating price points. I hope in my life that I will never let anyone haggle me for my price. My price is the price and often times I feel like you can’t put a monetary value on someone’s time and passion. We try our hardest as artists to get as close to where we feel like what our work deserves but for people to see clearly what the price is but then try to say no I’m going to give it to you for this amount. There is something very defacing about that and it feels kind of like someone spray painted all over my canvas. It feels terrible and in that moment your trying to wear many different hats as an entrepreneur. You are trying to be the artist and you are also trying to be the entrepreneurial source behind your business. There is always a voice in your head that says you know you need this sale and you need to make a profit and at least breakeven. Then you have the other voice that’s like don’t devalue your work. People don’t know how much time you put into this, how much energy, how many sacrifices. People don’t understand how much time you put in to prepare for the show or prepare for the opportunity and it takes a toll on you spiritually. I don’t go back and forth too much to dwell on it. There are diplomatic ways to do it where i can say well these are our products and we put a lot of energy into making them but maybe you can sign up for our newsletter and get 10% off on our website. There is a way that you can divert that without being condescending and I don’t want to be condescending. I am very cognizant of people’s scenarios especially artists.

How do you manage your time? Balancing life, work, and dedicating time to your passion?

I will let you know when I feel like I’ve created a matrix of all of my activities that I can organize my time. There was a period where I was not managing my time well. I still have a very real 9 to 5 job and case in point I’m still here in the space of my job. So, there was a time where I would come home and work for hours on different things relating to my business but with no real methodology but now i’m just more methodical because i was running myself ragged completely and I wanted to make time to hang out with my friends and go to happy hours. While I’m building my business, there is definitely a certain level of sacrifice but I’m at the point where juggling is working for me and I just try to create to-do lists. To-do lists are my lifesaver but specifically to-do lists that have a goal and have a specific objective in mind to reach a certain goal later on in the year. So, if I feel myself dragging on a specific task I then tell myself i need to break down the specific task to either smaller parts because something about this is making me procrastinate. So, that’s how I’ve been trying to manage my time and I feel great when I can mark something off of my to-do list and I see the progress in managing my time. I’ll also tell myself i’m only going to work 3-4 hours after I leave the office so I can have time to cook and actually eat.

What advise do you have for someone who is just starting out or who wants to go into design?

This is a hard question but there are things I know I should have done and I’ll give an example. One thing I should have done before starting my business is to research more about the entity I wished to create. Maybe I could have started jotting down a little bit of a business plan and then setting aside a bit of money so I can create a cohesive collection if that makes sense. Putting that capital aside and figuring out how i can have a product line where if I run out of a specific beads then I would know that i can afford to buy a specific number of units because I did my budgeting. I wish I had a little bit more of that before I started but at the same time I know myself and all of those details probably would have derailed me from actually starting. I would have tried to make all of that perfect and I don’t know when I would have started. It would have been so easy to keep pushing it back. So,I don’t regret how I started and I would tell someone to take the designs that they already have and get them out because if you want to scale your business from a small maker company into something a little bit larger your going to need help so the more you can streamline your process so that someone else can come on board and help alleviate your burden or your workload than it can be extremely helpful. I didn’t have that luxury but I had the opportunity to start so I just started and tried to get my ducks in a row after the fact. It is okay if things are not perfect because for me that was a real blessing of this journey just being able to talk to other people and be relatable. People look on the outside and see the finished product and my beautiful visuals but they don’t know that I shot that on my phone because I can’t afford a camera but I still put in the work to make  it all look good because I just have to have faith. If people feel like they need to start just start.

What type of people did you bring on to your team early on to be more efficient?

I currently have two job openings and one is for a creative marketing intern and so that’s for anyone who would like to learn how to merchandise products and create a cohesive branded digital presence and also do a lot of the PR outreach that a budding brand needs and a lot of the trial and error that goes into marketing and finding your right target audience but I’d like to say that this person would be interested in helping set up photoshoots and helping strategize digital incentives to get people to buy more products and to get customers to promote us of their own free will and then reaching out to influencers. Next, is a production assistant because I need an assistant in the creative process. However, there are also other things that I’ve fortunately been able to find angels around me who have helped me do a little of my accounting, book keeping, and my long term financial advising and a little bit of my business strategy. A few of my friends saw me at Afropunk and they  offered to help me with certain things. I have all kinds of friends who are business consultants, accountants and artists and I didn’t even think to ask them for help with my books.

So in the next 5 years, where do you see your brand and what type of customer do you see wearing your brand?

Well my 5 year plan will be dedicated towards creating sustainable opportunities for women, makers, and artists in Nigeria to partner with me to create some of my material. I’ve already started working with my family who live in Lagos to help me create some of the handprint fabrics that I will be using in future collections. I didn’t grow up physically aside that part of my family and for me it has been really gratifying to use my talent to be able to build a bridge over to them in Nigeria. It is hard to establish an inherent relationship because yeah we have our blood in common but the fact that they are creative and entrepreneurial and that they see my company as valid is gratifying. Also, the fact that they want to help create something that can benefit them and their families and that can help me grow means everything and it is an added bonus for it to be a family endeavor. However, I would like to have an establishment where specifically female makers and local artisans can work with Eluke to either not only produce these pieces but to help as as an entrepreneurial incubator so that they can do what they want to do with their craft. Whether that is to help them have a steady income or just a platform. It is something that I hope Eluke can bring to others specifically in Nigeria since my family is already there and I feel connected.

Where can people find you and what projects do you have coming down the pipeline?

I will be in DC vending at the National Museum of Women in the Art during their MakeHer market which is a pop-up artisan market promoting local women artists and designers. In October, I will take my designs and I will be vending out in California. Those will be the two main places where people can find ELUKE other than the website which is at Eluke.co but I am really excited about these opportunities.

Comment down below if you are a budding designer and relate with Etiti’s journey!

Boss Watch will feature creatives, entrepreneurs, influencers, digital professionals and anyone who is moving their passions from an idea into a reality. Boss Watch is for anyone who aspires to live a fulfilled life and just needs a little bit of inspiration to know that they are not alone on their journey towards self-realization. Boss Watch is for anyone who has made it through the growing pains of realizing their dreams and is now looking to share wisdom or just find new people to increase their network.  Is this you? If so, then feel free to leave a comment or email cnkstylebook@gmail.com for a chance to be featured on the next Boss Watch.