Words: Emily Armstrong

Tobi Ajala was 15 years old when her single mother flew from London to New York and queued for many hours to buy her the first-generation Apple iPod. It was an incredible gesture from her ‘superstar mum’, and a symbolic moment for the reserved West London teenager who spent her spare time consumed with sport, technology, and mechanics; whose favourite TV Show was ‘How It Works’.

The Apple obsession didn’t stop there. Nine years later Tobi began working at the Apple retail store in West London. Fast forward four years and Tobi was in a software development role at Apple’s London HQ. Then only two years later, Apple became the first major client for TechTee, the digital development and design business that’s earned Tobi the trust of some of the biggest names in luxury and fashion, and induction into the Forbes 30 under 30 for technology in 2021. “My mother went back to university when she was 35”, recalls Tobi. “So growing up I had a computer in the house and that point in time was when I made the design and the engineering connection. I loved design, every sense of it. I still do. Technology is only one part of a really big passion I have. But it was Apple as a brand to be very frank that brought those two really big components together.”

If you Google Tobi Ajala, alongside ‘epic women in tech’, a male English professional footballer (Toby Ajala) also appears, fairly prominently amidst the many accolades for Tobi and TechTee. This is somewhat frustrating as Tobi is Tobi, a one and only, driven self-taught yet also highly educated and experienced leader in the tech world. Ironically, Tobi herself was also a great athlete. In her mid-teens, she was on Team GB for track & field. And she had to make a choice: continue down the path of being a professional athlete or see what else life’s race had in store.  Success, it seems was destined on and off the field for Tobi Ajala but it feels like this young Black female industry leader should take all the well-deserved limelight on Google, particularly when we spell her name correctly. Perhaps it also highlights the amount of work still required to ensure diversity in gender and race show up equally as key terms associated with the tech industry. 

On her upbringing as the middle child of three in a Nigerian family in North-West London, Tobi recalls “I grew up with a single mother who worked as an immigration officer and she was very badass. Suit to work and then she'd drive to Dover and she'd be checking trucks for contraband. She was very, very inspiring and she was always the type to encourage, ‘What is it that you want to do?’ It’s very typical when having an African parent, for them to want you to be a doctor, engineer etc. My mother kind of just encouraged what we were good at.” 

Towards the end of Tobi’s first year of college in Ladbroke Grove, she went to the Shepherds Bush Library and picked up a software development book. “And that's how I taught myself my first software language, which is Java. I was 17.” She tells us. “And I've practically been coding ever since”. To be teaching herself computer coding from a physical library book speaks volumes, literally, of both what an early adopter Tobi was in the tech space, but also how far and fast the industry has evolved in the ten years since.  

“When I was really young, I used to draw”, says Tobi. “Now, I don’t know if it was that I was young and naïve or if I lost the touch, but when I was young, I was really good. When I got older, I started to draw again, do graphics. I started redesigning website pages with Photoshop. And then I was like, ‘I can't do these animations, I can do these transitions I'm seeing on Nike.com and that kind of thing.’ I remember very specifically my first front end project was redesigning and redeveloping the Nike.com website and then I tweeted it. I got 34 retweets and back then... we're talking 10 years ago, they were losing it. I was like, ‘Yes! People love this!’” 

On the next step in her formal education, Tobi says, “I was always going to go to university. It's why I never continued pursuing my athletic degree because I remember staring at a Team GB coach while he said, ‘You understand this starts now and this means no university. This is all you do. This is your job.’”

Manchester Metropolitan was Tobi’s secondary choice. Her first choice was the University of Birmingham but she didn't make the A levels. “I missed it by a couple of grades,” she tells us. “So I went to Man Met. My sister was at the University of Manchester so it was fine. It was a great year. But I thought, ‘I am going to go so hard with this.' And during that year I had a priest, an actual vicar, who was my core lecturer. A guy called Malcolm C Hill. Brilliant, brilliant mind. I ended up graduating top of my class, 87% that year.” With her grades this good, Tobi went back to her first choice, The University of Birmingham but something just wasn’t right. She was failing, badly and although both she and her lecturers knew she could do well, she wasn’t. At the same time, however, she was busy, really busy developing software and designing websites for local estate agents, bakeries, friend’s jewellery brands and so on. She didn’t realise it at the time, but this was the early incarnation of TechTee.                     

“So I'm failing university, but I can write software really well’ explains Tobi. “And so then I think, ‘You know what? Give me a minute.’ And I just stop. I spend the year writing software, picking up random gigs, and I work at Apple for the year, Apple store, White City which was fantastic, I loved it.” In the middle of that year, Tobi receives a call from a friend she hadn’t spoken to in years. Bola Awoniyi (co-founder of Black Ballad). He told her about an apprenticeship scheme at the BBC where university was included in the package that included paid placements. Initially not sure, Tobi decided to go through the interview process. She then became invested and the rest is history. She got the gig and spent three years completing the apprenticeship scheme at the BBC where she worked doing placements and graduated from the University of Salford. “I always say the BBC saved my life, and I don't think people understand the gravity that they have, the pull they have in the UK in terms of relationships with universities, relationships with businesses”, she says.                     

In the summer of 2017, Tobi graduated from university and the BBC scheme. “I looked at myself and kind of said, ‘What next?’’, she tells us. “I was planning on applying for Sony, to be a hardware engineer, and kind of just looking at other cool companies that I wanted to join. I was thinking, ‘Do I go back to Apple as a kind of corporate type thing?’”                      

And then her friend Bolo Awoniyi, who she likens to a guardian angel, called, again. ‘No, Tobi. It's time to take TechTee fully. You can do what you're doing as a contractor, one, for 500, 600 pounds a day. Number two, why don't you just service businesses like you've been doing but on a bigger scale?’ Tobi hesitated, she was feeling timid but then decided to go for it. “I incorporate TechTee officially after it being alive for about six years already. And it blew up from there,” she says. “It wasn't the fastest route, I have to be honest. I did quite a few contract roles so I could pay my bills and I could live my life between the tenders and the contracts we were getting as TechTee. And then I went to work for Apple for a stint and I had some great experiences there.”

While at Apple Tobi began to realise the duality of her experience and passion – the combination of development and design – which was not being utilised in a corporate setting as much as it could be from a tailored consulting approach. While she kept getting promoted within Apple because of her unique skill set and the ability to lead teams across different disciplines, the thought was always there that she could be doing this from TechTee, not as an Apple employee. And so began the process of Tobi becoming a full-time founder & lead of TechTee, and Apple becoming her first official big client.                        

TechTee, ‘where powerful tech meets exceptional design to create complete consumer experiences’ has attracted some big brand clients in luxury, fashion and finance such as Gucci, Apple, La Perla, Farfetch, Marks & Spencer and Deutsche Bank. At TechTee, design and development are interwoven for the best user experience. As Tobi tells us, “A lot of the things we did, especially over the last year and a half, have been digital experiences for brands because they couldn't do physical experiences during the pandemic. And when I'd speak to the clients, people in marketing, people in technology, they would always say, ‘We need to make this special because it can't be physical.’ If the VIP customers had been invited a year before, there's immediately a comparison that they're going to make. ‘But last year we were in this space and they gave us champagne and it was fantastic, there was music. Now, we've got a website and a link.’” This is where the TechTee team led closely by Tobi are given full autonomy to build incredible user experiences for these brands and their discerning customers.                        

Discussing the future of fashion and luxury markets, Tobi predicts big changes for streetwear and the reseller market, and a focus on VR & AR for the luxury market. “Streetwear has kind of trickled into luxury and fashion because the luxury part of fashion couldn't deny that streetwear was completely taking over”, she says, “But streetwear has a huge issue at the moment as there's a huge replica and reseller market. A couple of years ago I paid a lot of attention to building out technology to support only one purchase, checking people's IP addresses and different types of server controls to mitigate the number of robots that come to a platform and try to buy off shoes for example. And we dropped off on building that custom technology simply because we needed to focus more on the interface experience aspect of things. But I do see a height in the e-commerce side of streetwear fashion, having to revisit that because it's unsustainable. It's a huge bubble that's about to pop.                       

On the luxury side of things, I think building out bespoke experiences is a focal point for us at the moment. There's always something we're building in house. That is something not necessarily for TechTee to then branch off and create a product from but to offer to our clients to say, ‘Hey, we're already in your sector and we've been building this. We can just give it to you. We can just add this to your service,’ that kind of thing.                       

And one of the things we're doing at the moment is a big piece around AR and VR in luxury fashion. Being able to put your camera up and choose some products and it projects that onto your body through standard VR. So we're working on that right now and just building out different versions of the best way to utilize AR and VR within an e-commerce shopping experience. Especially as fashion evolves, silhouettes are becoming a lot more different. Our work in this space is all very applied. I think all of the ideas we come up with, a lot of them comes from my consumer point of view.

On the subject of mentoring, Tobi identifies many people who’ve helped her along the way and continue to inform her decisions in work and life. From her incredibly inspiring mother to the lecturer/vicar in first-year university to her colleagues at the BBC and Apple. More recently, Tobi identifies Kerry Sheeres from Discovery as a woman that has influenced her and given invaluable advice and support. And of course, it was her ‘guardian angel’ Bolo Awoniyi who empowered Tobi not once but twice to leap at opportunities that have shaped her future success.                        

During the pandemic, there's been one person that Tobi has really connected with, “a very successful events agency owner called Claire Berry (from Perfect Cartel). She has a strong client base and although there could be no physical events during the pandemic, they'd still come to her and say, ‘We've got these products. We planned to do events but we can't do them anymore.’ She posted something on her Instagram about looking for a developer. I reached out and that was the beginning of what has become one of my most valuable working relationships. Anytime she's got a client that needs some technology help, she picks up the phone or her second in command, Elliot, calls and that's how we've worked with La Perla. It's how we’ve worked with Marks & Spencer. If Claire calls, I answer and say ‘Let's get to work!’ And we produce the most amazing things. And it's those kinds of projects that have paved the way for Gucci to come on board. And other luxury fashion. I always knew I wanted to service luxury fashion. But from what I've found, it's very much a community and getting into that community hasn't been as easy as let's say when I'm working with technologists, even though they need a very heavy technical capacity. Claire has been a really big door opener.”                       

On being inducted into the Forbes 30 under 30 for technology earlier this year, Tobi says, “It’s validated TechTee in a way. I think that's special because it immediately offered a level of confidence to people when I approach them. Networking, as you can imagine is a huge part of my job now. But Forbes being in the title, people giving me a google and my name popping up as well as the footballer, but my name and my face popping up and the link being Forbes is kind of like going to Trustpilot in a sense.                        

Networking has and continues to be incredibly important to Tobi, and an introduction to working relationships, idea exchanges and mentoring. But Tobi is clever to take advice while also trusting her intuition regarding her business offering. “Forbes has caused some people to come and say, ‘Tobi, let me mentor you or let me give you some advice.’ And I listened to a couple and just heard them out and they all say the same thing which is, ‘Tobi, you need to specialise. Specialise,’ because I first say our biggest sectors are banking and finance, luxury and fashion, and they're all very different from each other. But I always end up explaining that they require the same part of our brains, the same part of our workload because the clientele, the users are the same: people with money, people that want to be treated well, and people that want a bespoke experience to an extent. So with luxury and fashion, that bespoke experience and that kind of customisation piece is a very big thing we're focusing on.”                    

"'I want to work with more people that look like me' was one very intentional thing about the TechTee business when I started,” Tobi tells us. When discussing the lack of diversity, particularly in race and gender, that still exists in the tech world, Tobi wants to see real change. “Throughout my working contracts and all the freelance projects I did, I still was always the only Black woman. Testing is slightly different. With software testing, there were a lot of women which is a fantastic thing. But when it comes to software development, especially front or backend, very rarely do I come across women. At the BBC during my placements and my work experience there, I was on four different software development teams and I was always the only woman. I did work with another Black man on one of the teams which was amazing. But it's still a very White male-dominated industry.  I remember we started working with a makeup brand and a couple of months ago I tweeted that I specifically want to hire a Black female designer for this. I'm not trying to be prejudiced, I'm not trying to exclude anyone. But if we're going to use design and use experience logic for a makeup brand for Black women, why is it not being designed and built by two Black women? I just don't understand why there's any other logic. I understand development is development so in a sense almost anyone can do it. Whoever can do it, can do it. But when it comes to the design, I'm asking for someone to build for Black women, to design for Black women. Why would I ask someone who is a White man to do this? The context will be lost. Things like that are very intentional with TechTee. My team is full of a diverse group of people. There's a couple of Asians. We've got White people, we've got Black people. We've got people of all heritages. And it's intending to utilise people because they have a skill set that is exceptional, but also because of their experiences. Without their experiences, it doesn't apply.”                     

Tobi Ajala has created and achieved so much already, and she’s not even 30. Finding her true purpose and delivering her passion through the lens of TechTee has been one of her life’s great adventures. ‘If you do something, do it well’ is a quote she lives by. TechTee’s impressive roll call of happy clients lays testament to her doing it (very) well indeed. “One of the things I always say is I'm very, very proud of TechTee as a business. We've got this 100% success rate. Each and every one of our clients is happy, very happy, and I think that's always the goal. We're aiming for this level of exceptional quality and we hit it every time with design, with development, we just hit it.”