#BellaNaijaWCW Nelly Agbogu Birthed her Business – Nellies Nigeria – From her Biggest Challenge

For our #BellaNaijaWCW feature this week, we celebrate Nelly Agbogu, the brains behind Nellies Nigeria, and the NaijaBrandChick brand.

Nelly started her business while trying to find a solution to some of her biggest challenges. First it was all about her trying to lose weight and having a healthy alternative until she discovered one of her children could only eat gluten free products. (Nelly has shared her weight loss journey on BellaNaija – read it here).

She started making research on how to create a gluten free snack for her baby as well as making healthy food options for herself.

Because she could not sustain importing gluten free snacks, she decided to learn, via YouTube, how to make these snacks.

She’d post the finished products on her BlackBerry Messenger and people would contact her saying they want it. She decided to make continue making them as there was an untapped market for them.

She continued in this path to see how she could scale the business. She was working at a oil servicing firm by day, and was building Nellies at night.

It soon paid off: by March 2016, she opened her first store in Victoria Island, Lagos.

Nellies Nigeria is an indigenous healthy bread, snack and meal company, that focuses on producing creative healthy snacks using local produce.

With NaijaBrandChick, Nelly helps businesses gain more customers and create more visibility via Instagram. She’s also the convener of the #NBCTradeFair.

She started NaijaBrandChick in December 2015 – she had already started Nellies and just wanted to just talk about how she used social media and the challenges she was encountering doing business in Nigeria.

We celebrate Nelly using her biggest challenges to birth a thriving business venture and we’re rooting for her!