Udobizness of The Week - Rine Chocolates

This week, we explore the sweet side of Udobiz with Rine Chocolates in the spotlight. Rine Chocolates specializes in doorstep delivery of a diverse range of chocolates in fancy personalized boxes to be used as gifts. They also offer cute note writing as an add on. Catherine Orekoya (aka “the chocolate whisperer”) owns this venture. In her day-to-day life, Catherine is interested in advertising, media planning and buying, insurance, sex and food. She also has multiple hobbies such as cooking, reading, watching movies and documentaries.

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Catherine opened Rine Chocolates for business in February 2019 while she was a final year student at UniLag. Initially, all her business was conducted strictly within the school premises and she managed to get a big enough following that she got nicknamed “chocolate girl”. One could easily identify her as the lady with the cute box of chocolates always hung over her shoulder. Talk about finding a way to mix up school and work. After graduation though, Catherine decided to rebrand and move on from strictly UniLag sales to residential and office deliveries. To plan for this, she put her business on pause in October 2019 and resumed it in December 2019 after she had come up with a solid strategy. She does admit that running the business is not easy mostly due to her being the sole proprietor of Rine chocolates. Aside from being the sole owner, she also handles branding, management, acquisition, marketing, PR etc. and whatever else a sole proprietor does. On the initial rebrand, she had a lot of issues with unreliable dispatch drives but managed to initially find a go to reliable dispatch company that was able to keeps up with her standards. As it currently stands, Catherine is happy about the sales numbers she is putting up but does admit that more work must be done for her to break into her target audience. Her aim is to build a global brand that houses all sorts of chocolates and treats from numerous parts of the world. She hopes to keep raising funds to make this a reality sooner rather than later.

At Rine Chocolates, customer interaction is seen as a huge factor for success and because of this, not only does Catherine make sure she adheres to the highest of standards as she interacts with customers, but she also tries to get detailed feedback in order to develop new improvement strategies. She also does not pay too much attention to competition because she believes that the customer base is big enough for people to not have to unhealthily compete. For her, consistency and good customer relations are major keys to a successful business.

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Being an entrepreneur in Nigeria, Catherine had nothing but criticism for the business climate in Nigeria. Her biggest issue is bad governance and the continuous effort of the leadership to frustrate the efforts of SMEs with annoying levies and licenses. She also mentioned the fact that being a woman in business within a patriarchal and sometimes backward society as Nigeria comes with its own challenges. Most commonly, male customers trying to switch business talks to something sexual. She mentioned that anytime she senses this, she immediately shuts the attempt down. She also advices other women to do the same and to also try not to do deliveries in person when possible because a lot of men feel entitled to women’s bodies and Nigeria is not a safe space.

Being the review driven enthusiasts that we are, we asked Catherine what she thinks of myudo.biz as well as what advice she could give us. "It’s a very superb platform and I hope it really gets the full attention it deserves." She replied.
Thanks for the compliments, Catherine! We are striving hard to gain the attention we deserve. Thank you for the feedback.

You can find Rine Chocolates on UdobizNG at http://www.myudo.biz/rinechocolates. Find more of this business creativity on:

Twitter: ChocolatesRine.

Instagram: rinechocolates.