Facebook showed me to the world of business – Nigerian jeweler, Sherifat Mohammed

Lovely mother and wife, Sherifat Mohammed who has become known as a top jeweler in Nigeria may just be saying a prayer or two for Mark Zukerberg, the founder of Facebook every morning for providing her with a platform to run her business.

Although she recounted in a recent interview that she was never happy with the 9 to 5 jobs she got stuck with but upon being relieved of her last corporate job she found a new vigour of life in business. But the spark she needed came from Facebook which encouraged her to push on.

According to her, she started business after she was dismissed from her last job at British Council in 2013, having worked with another company called Global Ocean in 2010. When she was given the boot she said she knew her time was up with corporate jobs. More depressing at the time was that she just had her first son. Getting sacked would have knocked many down, but it was a cue for Sherifat Mohammed to chart a new course in life.

“ I was home with a newborn after my dismissal and I started selling fabrics which was introduced to me by by husband’s cousin. We were 3 partners and profit was shared into 3. The fabrics business introduced me to Facebook for business and marketing which I never knew existed. This knowledge gained was one thing that really helped me when I eventually ventured into jewelry. Like I mentioned, the profit was shared into 3 so at the end of the day I really wasn’t getting much. It happened that my wedding rings had become too small for my fingers after childbirth, so I surfed the web to see if I could get something low priced to manage with the hopes that my finger size would return to normal later. I did find some low priced silver rings and on arrival they were more beautiful  than imagined and looked more expensive than the price I got them. I decided to put them up for sale on Facebook and to my greatest surprise I got a buyer the next day. I was so happy after my first sale and bought a few more rings. I used the same platform to market and sell and within a few days the little stock I had was also sold out.”

“My husband noticed how excited and driven I was so he gave me some money to buy more which I did and that was how my jewelry business started,” she added.

Sherifat Mohammed, has a BSc in Accounting from Bowen University, Iwo and a Masters degree in Human Resources Management from the University of Bradford in the UK.

After she was sacked by the British Council, she started her jewelry business in 2016, albeit unofficially.

Sherifat Mohammed who is happily married is from Okene in Kogi State but raised in Lagos. She was born on September 26, 1985.

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