By 2024, Egypt’s social e-commerce business will be worth more than $14.8 billion. The market opportunity can be ascribed to the country’s growing number of online social sellers (over 1.25 million), who assist unknown firms in selling and distributing their products through various networks. Brimore, a market leader in the country and, to some extent, Africa, has received $25 million in a Series a round following tremendous development over the last three years. Mohamed Abdulaziz and Ahmed Sheikha launched the company in 2017.
Both founders saw how difficult it was for developing companies to get their products to the mass market while working in the FMCG industry. This was owing to the dominance of established brands, which had created distribution infrastructure for themselves over time. On the other hand, hundreds of people, mostly women and stay-at-home moms, wanted to start their own e-commerce businesses but had no idea how to do so or what to sell.
Norrsken22, she claims, is to be the growth-stage local firm that enables companies to form meaningful relationships in order to increase revenue, acquire the best people, and facilitate development plans across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa. “When we started working on Brimore, we had the intention of making the products ourselves. However, because it was a very asset-heavy strategy at the time, developing our products wasn’t the best decision,” CEO Abdulaziz told TechCrunch in an interview.
“As a result, we began scaling by offering other products. At the same time, seeing how the network formed on the other side instructive. From a seller standpoint, we began onboarding an increasing number of sellers. The majority of them are female.” Brimore is an omnichannel social commerce platform that connects both worlds through an app. As a result, small and medium-sized suppliers may be able to provide access to these emerging items to these individuals, who also work as sellers and word-of-mouth marketers. This manner, the manufacturers can focus on their promotion and marketing while the sellers start their e-commerce enterprises and earn some extra money.
Brimore boasts that their revenue has increased 400% in the last three years. On the platform, there are over 300 vendors with over 8,000 distinct SKUs from packaged meals, personal care, and household goods. In addition, the social commerce platform has created a network of 75,000 vendors in Egypt, with 74% of them being women, covering 27 cities, mostly in rural and isolated areas.
Brimore employs “its unique infrastructure–which is an ecosystem of supply, demand, logistics, and finance– and patented technology to provide market penetration chances to developing brand owners,” according to a statement. “We’re creating a smart, dependable infrastructure as well as a complete environment that allows people to transact.” So anyone can do commerce business with Brimore, whether they have a shop or are a stay-at-home mom,” said Ahmed Sheikha, the company’s chief business and investment officer.
