Architect turned interior designer with passion for live shopping

Navigating open-air markets is a skill that requires a trained eye and the patience to sift through hundreds of products in search of those with impeccable quality. Christine Kerosi, an architect by training who now earns a living as an interior designer, has both.

Coupled with a knack to stand out, she developed the idea for a “live shopping experience”, which, as the name suggests, involves her shopping live for her clients.

She goes to the market and other shopping outlets at a certain time, which she announces to her audience on her social media platforms, and showcases to them, in real time, the best home décor pieces on offer. She then delivers the purchased products to her clients at a small fee. The convenience seems almost unmatched.

She gained her experience in interior design while working for an architectural company that also dealt with interior finishing, back in 2012.

“I would attend the site visits and return to the office to work on quotations for the interiors, design the interiors using the architectural plans and also do the shopping myself to gain more experience,” she told the DN2 Property.

Shortly after leaving the company, she began to design homes, bringing the vision of her clients to life using the knowledge she had acquired. This journey would culminate in the registration of her interior design company, Aurom Designs, in 2017.

Her husband, Erick Kerosi, is also involved in the interior design business as a furniture designer.

“I encourage my clients to invest in good furniture first, then we can thrift when it comes to decorating the house,” she says.Convincing clients that live shopping was an effective formula required an organic marketing plan, hence her Instagram page @live.shopping.experience, as well as a Youtube channel, Tina Say’s Kenya.

“The Instagram page came before the YouTube channel, then I saw the niche where there weren’t many interior designers showing people how the craft works in Kenya, hence the YouTube channel,” she explains.

Live shopping

After realising that her followers on Instagram were keen to learn more about her work, she created three WhatsApp groups, an audience mainly made up of women, who are “thirsty” to learn how to decorate and improve their homes.

“Online, most retailers take pictures of an item and post it along with the price and that’s it. You never get to know who is behind the account, you’ll just receive your items and the relationship ends there,” she says, explaining that she wanted her brand to be different, hence directly interacting with her clients.

Being left with items that nobody seemed interested in was also a motivator for the live shopping concept.

“Sometimes I’d spend so much energy and time at Gikomba Market looking for items, take good photos and post on my page, but no one would buy, leaving me with dead stock,” she says.

Frustrated with this outcome, she decided to start advertising her shopping trips, informing her audience what time she would make the trip and invite them to follow her live as she shopped.

“I post the items live on my stories, and to buy them, my audience has to be online at that time,” she explains, adding that the concept immediately resonated with her audience, since she would do all the hard work of sifting through mountains of products and presenting them with the best products for them the choose.

The clients then bid for these items live, but they have to send her the money, after which she purchases the items for them.

While the concept is gradually catching on, the business has not been without challenges. For instance, early 2020, a series of fires razed parts of Gikomba Market, then her main shopping ground, just when her Instagram page was gaining traction. Coupled with the government’s ban on mitumba trading as a precaution against Covid-19, the future of her new business looked bleak.

It is then that it occurred to her that she could not afford to rely on one outlet for her business, she had to figure out how to keep the business moving.

“What happened in Gikomba, (market) was an eye opener, it prompted me to ask myself what I would do if the market didn’t exist.”

That is when she decided to take the live shopping experience to Mombasa.

She had conducted a survey earlier in the year, asking her audience if they would like her to visit the popular Nawal Centre, in Mombasa, a shop that stocks various home decor items and decorative knick knacks.“

I showed them each and every item in the seven-storey building, live, I took photos, videos and gave the audience the pricing details, only marking it up by asking them to pay me as they would a personal shopper,” she explains.

Mombasa has now become her favourite shopping destination.

“There is so much there that can be brought to Nairobi to be resold,” she explains.

Now, she says, there’s no stopping her.

Her clients like it that she offers them a cheaper alternative to suit their decor needs and that she scouts for new stores around Nairobi and tell them what to expect when they go shopping there.

Customer satisfaction

Beyond this customer satisfaction, Christine says that her content creation has also led to a boost in sales for the vendors at these markets.

“I went to Little Dubai and found some faux flowers, which some online vendors n sell at a much higher price, when I returned there after two months, the vendors told me that they ran out of stock a week after I showcased their items on my channel. I love such feedback, because it means that the work I am doing is making an impact on my audience,” she said.

Her audience also recommends shops that she can showcase on her page since they have come to value her perspective as an interior designer.

“They’re using me to get to what they want because they rely on my feedback, they are confident in my eye,” she says.

Some of her favourite finds while thrifting are beddings. “You can find designer beddings at markets such as Gikomba at more competitive pricing than those who sell imported beddings,” she points out.

Thrifting, she says, allows her to be more creative with her decor options, displaying a lush white throw cushion she made using material from a second-hand duvet cover. Interested? Follow her on social media.

She also incorporates her own renovation experiences in her content to show her audience how they can alter their spaces.

She and her husband recently purchased an old house, and are currently in the process of remodeling it to their liking.

They have involved their audience in the process, she wants them to see the value in creating a home by altering a pre-built structure.