ZIA Africa · Stephanie Kabi's Portfolio

ZIA Africa is a modern clothing brand that uplifts women into modern elegance with confident, classy fashion (see the website). The brand was founded by Zia Bett, a Nairobi-based fashion entrepreneur who went against the grain to build her own distinct visual style with ZIA Africa.

She needed an e-commerce website that would make purchases from her social and offline networks easy. By automating the business online, she could have more time to create better opportunities to grow the brand.

Introducing her customers to Social Shopping

Zia had amassed an enormous follower base of 15k+ individuals mainly on Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp over almost a decade. However, she had some increasing trouble coordinating these time-consuming customer management tasks to keep her brand afloat:

Taking orders on messaging apps
Sharing product photos
Checking orders off with direct payments
Making checkout short & easy for her customers
Running seasonal campaigns
Keep her first-time customers coming back & build recurring revenue

Her first priority was to get an e-commerce website that would solve the first four problems. We got her set up on Shopify instead of WordPress, because she would be able to optimize her store’s growth with Shopify’s advanced ecommerce analytics.

Which Ecommerce Platform is Best — Squarespace, Shopify or WordPress?

ZIA Africa website — https://ziaafrica.com

Once her product catalog went public on her website, we connected her store to her Instagram Shop. Now, she could:

Group products into collections on her social media
Link products directly to her social posts
Take followers directly into checkout from her Instagram profile
Add discount codes to her social posts to help convert new followers into customers
Monitor which products her followers viewed & clicked on most with a tracking pixel
And more amazing benefits that help her grow her brand online

Instagram Shop had just launched globally a month before Zia’s project began in late 2020, and her website was the first successful experiment to test it with.