Ndiho Media

By Paul Ndiho

This an interesting story about a Ugandan Mandela Washington Fellow and budding entrepreneur whose dream is to become the largest manufacturer of beauty and home care products.  Martin Mugabi has taken his startup Twinkle Industries to new heights.

Being passionate about your work is a major key to success and Martin Mugabi fits in that category. It was his passion that triggered him to start Twinkle Industries, a beauty and home care products company. Since returning to his native land in 2014, Martin Mugabi has turned his passion into a profitable business. And literary turned this house into a mini factory.

“When you visited us last year, you saw us operating in a shack; we are no longer work in a cabin. We have managed to rent some premises that can be visible.”

Mugabi says that manufacturing beauty and home care products in various products is a business that he has thought about for the last three years. His products are sold in shops across Kampala and its surrounding areas.

“We’ve changed the way we do business. While at the beginning of the year, we’re struggling to get customers, by asking individuals to buy and try out our products. Things have changed, our major primary customers now wholesalers. And we are focusing on the biggest wholesalers in this country.”

When I first met Martin nearly two years ago, he told me that he didn’t have any technical knowledge on the process of making beauty and home products – but he certainly does now, and his ambition is to take on the giant beauty and home cleaning goods companies.

“We now manufacture on demand, and previously we made so many things, and begged people to take whatever they could. Now we’ve tested out the market, it has pushed out our products out, and we’re no longer manufacture to look for what we can find, we get orders and we make those orders. People have appreciated our orders they have understood our brands. It is now recognizable.”

For a rising start-up like Twinkle manufacturing, beauty, and home care products can be a perfect business opportunity, if you have the right formula and people to do the job.  Mildred Awili is the company’s chemist.

Although there are many products on the market, making beauty and home care products can be a perfect business opportunity, if you have the right people to market the product like Sandra who says that her customers are curious about some of Twinkle’s merchandise.

Like any start-up company, Twinkle Industries is not without its challenges. For example, getting her product line certified citified and approved by the Uganda Bureau of Standards took a long time. Other constant problems include power blackouts. But despite these hurdles Magubi says that the sky is the limit.