The global fashion industry is reputedly worth $450 billion dollars per year and Nigerian-born Angela Udemba wants a piece of it. This is why she gave up what promised to be a glittering career as a scientist in cancer research.
The 26-year-old is launching Fashion Strikes, a London based fashion-tech and events business start-up. Within three years, she believes her company will turn over $5 million.
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“Investors ask for your projections, I say five million revenue, and they don’t believe me. But that’s what I believe the business is easily capable of,” she says.
Fashion-tech is an emerging and potentially lucrative fashion industry sweet spot. Online businesses are delivering diverse services; everything from matching your personal taste in clothes, via your social graph, to literally mapping your body to fit custom-made items.
“Given the size of the fashion industry and the thousands of retail brands out there and emerging still, there is a hell of a lot more money to be made.”
Of the young online fashion businesses, the determined Udemba thinks the Lyst.com business model has been the biggest influence.
“Lyst is Twitter for fashion, and you can follow designers and fashion influencers. Unlike other sites, it also allows you to buy all the products you see—so called affiliation sales. Lyst are reported to make $1 million in affiliation sales per month in less than three years. If true then that is indeed very impressive.”
The Fashion Strikes website calls itself “a unique fashion social platform built with emerging designers, fashion fans, bloggers, models and creatives in mind”. The focus, it says, is firmly on new designers, creating a space to foster collaboration and help them smash through the industry’s closed doors.
Udemba’s key differentiator is that she can guarantee those designers access to catwalk exposure. Live fashion and dance extravaganzas are planned for London and Abu Dhabi—with a Lagos show to be announced. The events are intended to build a buzzy, hip, ahead of the curve online community. It hopes to capture the old money of Europe and new money of Africa.
Despite all this blue-sky thinking, investors aren’t so keen on the start-up’s ambitious plans. Udemba has yet to complete her first funding round.
“Investors hear ‘fashion’ and they instantly go deaf,” she explains.
“They have never heard of a digital business linked with annual global events, and we don’t fit the mold. For now I’d rather be self-funded than sell out to investors, holding 51% of the business, who don’t understand the spirit of what we are trying to achieve.”
Investors may see the fashion events as an unnecessary diversification—but Udemba sees them as a core.
“The budget for the London production is £100,000 ($156,000), the production in Nigeria is easily at least five times that. We aim to charge one million naira ($6,145) for a VIP ticket and hundreds of thousands for standard tickets is the norm in Nigeria. We will be putting on an entirely unique, high-quality production before an audience of thousands, and you can begin to see how the event side of the business acts as the cash cow with revenues invested into the social media platform.”
The journey from high-flying medical scientist to fashion entrepreneur may seem an unlikely one to everyone but her. Udemba has already enjoyed a good academic career, earning a first class degree with distinction in chemistry from York University in Toronto, and is about to complete a four year PhD sponsored by Cancer Research UK, at Imperial College, London.
Writing up her thesis and simultaneously starting up a business with a global dimension is exactly the challenge she thrives on.
“I’m very driven. I go above and beyond to do my absolute best in everything. I just get up very, very early to write the thesis, which is great fun. It’s worked so far, so we shall see with this business.”
“Ever since I went to my all-girl convent school, Gumley House, in West London, I loved science and found it easy. But I also loved music, dance and the arts, even though I found it harder. At university I got hugely involved with putting on shows, and Fashion Strikes is a natural extension of my love for fashion, dance and live events.”
So how Nigerian does Udemba feel?
“I would say I’m British Nigerian. I left Nigeria when I was 13 and my mannerisms can be defined by Nigerians as very British,” she says.
“I recently went back and loved it. You hear stories about Lagos, so I was quite apprehensive. I landed at night and the very next morning I was at WOWe (Women of West Africa Entrepreneurship Conference). I got to meet so many successful women making a difference in Africa—it was absolutely inspirational. That’s what’s so amazing about Nigeria, everyone is so entrepreneurial and no one does just one thing.”
It’s been quite a journey from Lagos to London and from cancer research to cutting edge digital fashion. Now, like every entrepreneur, however good the idea, what Udemba needs is to meet the right investor.

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The Scientist Turned Fashionista With $5 million In Her Sights