Words: Emily Armstrong

“Everything I say I want to do, I find a way to do it because there's a reason I'm saying I want to do it.” It's this kind of direct determination, the confident can-do attitude of Mariam Jimoh that almost assures success...

From studying medicine to entering the world of banking, founding social enterprise, WCAN mentoring black women in corporate finance, to now becoming an entrepreneur launching the ethnic grocery delivery app, Oja and being inducted into the Forbes 30 under 30 in technology this year, there isn’t much Mariam Jimoh hasn’t achieved so far in life. But while she makes it look easy, Mariam is not only an innovator but also a grafter and the early stages of the Oja launch are a testament to this.  

Mariam grew up as the eldest child of a Nigerian immigrant family. London born and raised, her closest association with her culture has always been through the food. “I'm a second-generation immigrant and this is how I'm close to my culture. And also I'm a foodie, I love to cook, I love to eat out”.  The idea for Oja, simply meaning ‘market’ in Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, came to Mariam back in 2018. While working long hours during the week in finance, she’d find an empty fridge on the weekends and the idea of travelling all over London to access the food she craved didn’t appeal and she knew the cultural products she wanted were simply not available to order online. She began to realise she was not alone in her predicament and started to investigate the value chain around cultural groceries and the subsequent underrepresentation of the over 14 million ethnic minorities in the UK. Here is a market that Mariam Jimoh felt is ripe and ready for disruption.

 On her foray into the world of start-ups, Mariam says it best, “I just like to have an idea or a thought or a theory and be able to test it immediately. There's no hierarchy and there's no playbook, you're creating the playbook. And then all of a sudden, you've changed a million people's lives. That to me is super exciting.”

Photography: Helene Sandberg

Photography: Helene Sandberg

Growing up, Mariam’s parents held high aspirations for her university study and eventual profession. “The job options were pretty much like doctor, lawyer, engineer, and I went down the doctor route. I was an all-rounder at school and I had good grades generally in all subjects. Nothing stood out to me apart from that I knew that I wanted to be successful and important, these were the only things. And my parents said, ‘Why don't you just go and study medicine? Why don't you be a doctor?’ I just thought, "Okay, yeah, fine. What's the best university to do medicine in the UK, even if it's not Oxbridge?" And I knew I wanted to be in London, so then I chose UCL (University College London).                               

And I think when I got to UCL, I realised that you can't say you want to be a doctor on a whim at one of the best medical schools in the country. So after a year, I realised very quickly I didn't want to be a doctor and I was just doing it for the vanity and just to tick a box as opposed to what I was interested in. In my final year yearbook, I wrote that I was going to go and get a degree and become a doctor and get the doctor in front of my name and then I was going to go and be an investment banker. I just cut the medicine degree short, did a three-year degree instead in the same thing, and then started interning at investment banks so I could just get some experience in investment banking.”

While still at university, Mariam began to plan her banking career and started her first internships. “I was interested in banking when I was in university, and when I did my first internship, I realised there were no black women. I didn't see people who were like me. I didn't see them as my peers, and I didn't see them higher than me, and I didn't see anything to aspire towards either.”

This prompted Mariam to set up WCAN, a network for the professional development of black women in the UK. “I set up WCAN to find people who like me who were interested in working in the corporate world or were already working in the corporate world and connect them to people who are a little bit higher in the corporate world.”

“So that's how I set up the first conference.” She continues, “It was pretty much, ‘Here's how you can get your first internship. This is how you can network with people who are from different firms, etc. But then also, here are some people who've done this who look like you, listen to what they have to say and connect with them. ’That was the premise of what we were building. And it was because I didn't have it when I did my first internship.”

After graduating from UCL and several summer internships, Mariam moved into the world of banking at prestigious firm Rothschild & Co. Meanwhile in 2014, she was selected by Mckinsey & Company as a Next Generation Women Leader.  

On her desire to leave banking and become an entrepreneur, Mariam tells us, “I've always known I one day would work for myself and that I would be the kind of person who would build something myself. For me, my love for start-ups and innovation and big ideas and working with really cool people who are taking risks and executing, that's always been something I'm super excited about. And I think it was just a matter of time - I started my first business in university, so I was always moving towards becoming an entrepreneur.

Photography by Helene Sandberg

Photography by Helene Sandberg

I just like to have an idea or a thought, or a theory and be able to test it immediately. I think that is what makes start-ups cool, it's that we could be doing this today and then test something and then you do something different tomorrow because this is what data is telling us to do. There's no hierarchy or there's no playbook, you're creating the playbook. And then all of a sudden, you've changed a million people's lives. That to me is super exciting.”                                   

The first step into startup life began while Mariam was still working long hours in the banking sector. “I had the idea for Oja when I was working in banking, and it was simply because I was working these 17, 18-hour days and you just don't cook because you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the office. And if you do get a Saturday where you're not working, your fridge is empty because you haven't had a chance to buy any groceries.                                   

Whenever I needed groceries, I had to order them and just make sure that my fridge could have something in it if I was at home and it was stuff that I wanted to eat or wanted to cook. And I realised there was this whole subsector of products that I couldn't order online, there was just no way for me to get them, for me to easily order them the way I order avocado.                                   

At first, I thought, ‘This is just so annoying.’ And maybe it's just me because I'm a second-generation immigrant and this is how I'm close to my culture. And also I'm a foodie, I love to cook, I love to eat out. I'm always out trying different restaurants and trying different things. But then as I spoke to more and more people, I realised, actually, if you're from an immigrant background, if you're from a particular community, maybe like a religious community, if maybe you've spent some time abroad, people were dealing with this problem in their own unique way.                  

So from here, it was really a case of, ‘Let me try and understand this value chain of ethnic foods or cultural foods and see where the value could really be extracted for us to benefit these communities that are obviously incredibly underserved, everybody's kind of ignoring, and the current solutions are just not really cutting it the way everything else is.’ It's almost like everything aligned for this business to come forward at this time, even though I had the idea in 2018 something has been in the back of my mind for a very long time and it’s a problem that I have faced since living on my own.                                    

For me it was a personal problem, but then it just became really obvious to me that this market hasn't been touched. It hasn't changed in 25 years, the way that people buy these products hasn't changed.”                              

While still focusing on WCAN and keeping her day job in banking, Mariam began to build out the strategy for Oja and the customer was at the heart of it. “I feel just the way the world is means that sometimes people are forgotten and people are overlooked,” she says. “And I think for me just being a black woman, I know it's like I'm a double minority. That’s just always is in the back of my mind, like, ‘Who is being forgotten here?’ Because when you forget somebody and then you suddenly start serving them, they will be so loyal to whatever it is you're giving them. This is an excellent commercial proposition if you can serve somebody in the way that they've never been served before.”

The first stage of the soft launch of Oja was to test and learn. “We ran a pilot, started in December and it's still running now to be quite honest, but it was meant to operate for a specific period of time, just to understand the market dynamics, understand what people are interested in shopping”, explains Mariam. “And we did this using local stores. We wanted to just think, how could we quickly learn about this market without having to invest in inventory, without having to build a warehouse or anything like that? How could we just learn?                            

So we worked really closely with these local stores and onboarded some products, and then we started operating and we tried different things. First of all, we started only in London, then we offered the flat delivery where we would send it anywhere across the UK just to test how it would travel. And we did this for 12 weeks and we collected the results, and the everything we learned, we used that to then go out to fundraise.                                  

Then came the onboarding of the many, many independent ethnic stores. “I knew from the beginning that for me to offer a different experience here and a different proposition, I had to really graft to collect data and to collect images,” Mariam says. “So we took pictures and made it look nice and put up and put them on marble backdrops and got a great photographer to take a lot of photos and then collected all the data manually.”                        

That's the process. everything starts manually. You have to hustle a bit before you get to the point where things can be automated. And even then, it wasn't easy at all. I'm glamorous, I like to have a bit of fun. I'm always going out to eat. And then it was all of a sudden, in stores for eight hours scanning products…But it was fun and it felt really real. And that was super cool. My best friend came to help me and it was just great.”

On the current state of networking within the tech sector and the role of mentors, Mariam says, “It's getting better in terms of being able to find some role models or mentors, but to me, it's still not really there. For me, if you ask me a question, I'll give you all the answers or more, because I just think that it's important to have these relationships where you can handhold somebody to the point where they can start walking and then start running.                         

In my own journey, there have been a lot of male allies who have been amazing and really useful and helped me to grow my network. And even to the point where they will introduce me to women. So they'll say, ‘Yeah, fine, I'll back you, but this is a really amazing woman that you should speak to.’ Because sometimes it's hard to find these women or it's hard to connect with them. I think the corporate world is the same as tech, maybe even tech might be a little bit behind in that it's an environment that's developing its diversity and inclusion right now, and it's getting better and better, but it's not there yet.”                                 

Mariam is currently raising funds for the Oja seed round and the future looks bright. She has some advice for fellow entrepreneurs in the fundraising stage: “At this early stage, because it's super early, they're not buying into just the idea, actually more so, they're buying into you as a founder and your ability to execute this idea and your team as well. And you need to be able to sell that vision, sell the market and sell yourself and the team. And that's a bit of a difficult job for everybody to do and need the person who had that first vision and had that first idea, and knows exactly where it's going. And that's the job of the CEO. So it's almost like that's what I had to translate over, and that is what I've been pitching.                            

It's really important to realise you've spent a year or years grinding on something, you're the expert, you know what you're talking about, so go into the room and maybe show that. And I think that changed my mindset as well in terms of how I was approaching things.                            I also think that you're not lucky to be in the situations that you're in, that you are the opportunity, anyone who is interacting with you is actually quite lucky. And I think that changed my mindset a lot when I was going out to fundraise, where I was like, ‘This is an opportunity I'm bringing you, so would you like to be in?’ As opposed to, ‘Would you like some of this?’ Which is a completely different mindset and people can sense that."                         

When asked about the best advice she’s ever been given, Mariam quotes Jeff Bezos. “I think the biggest advice I was given, it's to release at 70. Jeff Bezos said it, that's the way they work at Amazon. And it's just like when you get to a point where you've covered 70% of the basis, release it, and then it's rated, and take feedback, and then go again and go again. But don't wait till you're at 100% to put something out into the world because you could be in the wrong direction or there's a key at the centre that can change and be adjusted. And then you can make it great. You make it better, you can take it further.” And with that, we know that this ambitious entrepreneur will take it further than even she imagines. 

Photographed by Helene Sandberg at AllBright.