Jeffrey Jessie "SPESHOZ"

Jeffrey Jessey.
By Elizabeth Tungaraza
With ready-made clothes flooding the market, most people, especially the young generation prefer to buy their outfits from the malls or boutiques. This is becauseof the poor services they get from some local tailors.But for 28-year-old Jeffrey Jessey, things are different as he can make you look elegant and confident at the same time. He and his three colleagues came up with Speshoz fashion line to make clothes which truly fit and make people look good. In fact, he is behind the look of some of our top musicians, politicians among others.Success had an interview with him and he shared his successful story on how it all started."My wife Cecilia Mosha and I run a fashion group called Speshoz Tanzania which is situated at Sinza Africa Sana in Dar es Salaam. Speshoz is a clothing line that was established in 2013 March with a key focus in providing the market with custom made outfits for both men and women," explains Jeffrey.He says the group was initially established in March by him and three other people who later left due to some reasons.Both Jeffrey and his wife are graduates from the University of Dar es salaam and they both feel that their education background did quite a bit in exposing them to the modern world though not so much to the specifics of the fashion industry.Explaining how he developed his interest in fashion design, Jeffrey he grew up watching his mother who was a tailor."My mother was a tailor back in the days and she alwaysmade sure that some of us learnt how to stitch differentthings. In my days as a child this used to be a heavy punishment though I would always thank her at the end of it all," he recalls."My father used to tell me about the beauty and the confidence gained from knowing that you are either properly dressed or fully fashionable," he says.According to him,this grew to be an in-depth interest and at some point when he was doing his masters in International Business, he learnt that in life one can actually commercialise their interests and passion."It was this point in 2013 where I looked and dug deeper inside to know that there was nothing I loved more than dressing up in a manner that would attract attention of different people," he explains"My wife Cecy loved looking good but had no tailoring background even though her mother had sewing machine in the early 1990s. She came up to my rescue when I was left alone helplessly by the group we startedthe business with. She was a quick learner and a great adopter of my interest and saw potential and the biggerpicture," he says.Like it is in many business everyone has to start somewhere and the case had been for Jeffrey who according to him he started with a small capital."Interestingly I started with only 60,000 shillings that I was given by a client as a down payment. I will thank Mr Ereneus Sway as he trusted me with that amount of money. I had no machine, no office; technically I had nothing but an idea and a plan," he recalls.He went further saying "I remember going to local fundis with my pieces of clothes cut waiting to be stitched since I had no machine and needed help with stitching. It was not easy and just like many other small businesses. Then I kept dipping down to my pockets to finance certain orders. I learnt over the years and developed my capital through savings, bought one machine after the other, moved one office to the next, while expanding our production capacity."At this point in time we proudly can stand and say we own more than 60 machines with non-existent external financing but savings and multiple reinvestments of the saved funds," he confidently announces.Recalling his first job, Jeffrey says it was with the WorldBank Country office in Tanzania where he did quite and number of things to a point that he was appointed azonal coordinator for Water and Sanitation programmes."I can't tell you how much I loved my job only that therewere a few things missing. The main thing that was missing which made my attention switch to fashion was that I wanted to control both the output and the input. At the Bank I could only control the input but not very much the output," says Jeffrey.He says Speshoz was his wife's first job and that has been the most instrumental aspect in the growth and development of their business. "It was arguably the biggest challenge to turn a Natural Scientist to a fashion designer, this challenge was not just between us but with family members as well. Born in a well off and an intellectual family, the decision was not so easy to come by," he narrates.As one of the successful fashion designers, he says there are a number of things that describe their fashions and style."We have tried and maintained our art of style, quality and uniqueness in most of the products. We have thus farbeen successful enough in bringing a balance between the modern and traditional ways of dressing. Most of other designers or tailoring houses have chosen to stick to either a formal dress up or the traditional dress up, some have picked to either go with male or female but we decided to go for both while maintaining both the traditional and modern dressing style," he boasts.That goes hand in hand with how he handles his daily tasks at his fashion company The Speshoz."As an owner and operator there are multiple tasks that call for long hours which include, designing and creationof different outlook patterns, marketing and brand management, managing the business as a whole, point to point supervision of various processes, scouting and recruitment of talents, business expansion strategies," he narrates.With such long working hours comes stress however for him it has not become an obstacle in performing his daily work."In our line of business stress is our daily cup of tea. Stress rises from a lot of aspects, such as work load, unnecessary changes in outfit plans, unforeseen events such as power cuts.We manage the stress by pinpointing exactly what the problem is and finding a way to work around it. With clients we try and ensure that prior communication in the event of unforeseen events or delays is done. Our daily meetings help us manage our customer expectations," he explainsChallenges are inevitable as explained by Jeffrey such as lack of trust from customers who had seen or heard less about what we do, lack of enough manpower to meet the demands, lack of sufficient machinery and inadequate idea-buy-in from the people related or closeto them like family members.There are also challenges associated with the growth of the business as well as expansion, "each of the offices we have had so far have been insufficient, expectations management, growing demand surpasses ourproduction capacity in certain seasons plus structural adjustments which are tricky at times," he notes.There are a number of important facets of the fashion industry that Jeffrey states."There has been a renewed interest in old fashioned stuff coming back in a refurbished manner. We have seenvitenges that were neglected in the early 2000s comingback massively and this time embraced by all genders," he says adding that"contemporary attires have also beenheavily introduced to the Tanzanian market such as shirts that have both the African patterns mixed with formal or modern patterns. This has featured both male and female outlooks," explains the Fashion guru.He is proud to have a list of prominent personalities who were dressed by his design company The Specioz as well."We have dressed quite a number of prominent personalities such as musicians like Diamond Platnumz, Ambwene Yesaya, Yamoto Band, Chege Chigunda. legislators like Anthony Mavunde, Stanislaus Mabula, Ridhiwani Kikwete and Salum Ally Hapi who is a District Comissioner to mention but a few.Jeffrey says he is a strong believer of meditation through peaceful ways. Which according to him has largely helped in building and maintaining business and personal relationships.He also considers himself as a people's person since he puts emphasis on customers' needs and wants."One of our biggest dream is to get to a point of beingone of the worlds recognised fashion brands.," he concludes.
He turns out to be the best fashionist in Tanzania, hope his life story brings hope to those who had given up before. Thank you SPESHOZ
"JEFFREY JESSIE "

 https://www.instagram.com/p/BS4SQ66gfF0/