Whereas a number of women give up on employment to become stay-at-home mums, Georgina Mwebaza wasn't one of them.
After resigning her job as a bank teller due to her pregnancy, the Founder of Spice My Space said that after being rejected by former workmates and being idle at home, she decided to do something more productive with her time.
“At first I loved staying at home but I lost all my friends because being in the banking section, one has bougie friends who now realize they can’t even ask you to borrow a ka 50k. Your messages end up getting blue ticked because you don't have a job.” The mum revealed during an interview with Crystal Newman on the Groove Cafe at RX Radio.
She added, “What hurt me most is when I was at home and my friends decided to go to the beach without even letting me know yet I was living along the route they were using. I just saw photos and that's when I realized they had really forgotten about me. I made the decision to move on and accept that I was no longer that person I was before.”
Staying at home was not Mwebaza’s cup of tea. She had a helper who was assisting her with pretty much everything and because of this, she found she had a lot of idle time on her hands.
“I started doing DIYs with my space; I started with making paper flowers and cushions. I knew that with time I could grow bigger and stop doing it for only friends and family. From there, I opened up a Facebook page,” Mwebaza recounted.
Mwebaza started posting her work on her Facebook page and the response was overwhelming with people giving her orders, including event decorators. Before long, she was having sleepless nights but was still reluctant to hire any employees out of fear of getting extra hands before the business stabilized.
In 2019, she got more clients but without knowledge of how to charge, some people took advantage of her. She made decorations and undercharged for them whereas others used her ideas to create their own designs.
To remedy this, she took on a course in interior designing and that is when her knowledge about the business expanded.
Crystal then asked Mwebaza what the hardest thing about being an interior designer is, which she said is the client’s reaction after decorating their spaces.
“The hardest thing is thinking that you have delivered, you look at the carpet, curtains and the space and you love it, but your client does not. That means you will have to do everything or lose them. So you'll have to dig into your pocket to redo their designs so as to keep them and that is really painful on the pocket and crashes your feelings as well.”
However, unlike other businesses that suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mwebaza said hers grew during the period of the lockdowns because people were grounded and got to realize that they needed to brighten up their homes. Through Instagram and Facebook, she reached out to a number of clients to preach to them about the need to spice up their spaces.
The Groove Cafe with Crystal Newman airs every Weekday from 4-5pm on RX Radio.
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