Outdoor visibility is her forte

You have seen those colourful advertisements on billboards, shopping malls, road reserves, floors, banks, walls, buses and other locations - colourful, crisp, creative, and certainly eye catching.

It is all about new products aiming to raid emerging markets, or old products struggling to remain afloat in a viciously competitive market.
In the past few years, perhaps you have been savouring the creative genius of Benedicta Kimeu, a fast rising name in the world of outdoor advertising.

For two years now, Three Cube Printing Ltd, where she is managing director, has been rocking the industry with contracts to print creative advertisements for corporate firms, banks, airlines, churches and advertising agencies, at least according to products seen by Saturday Magazine at her Kijabe Street printing offices.

Many corporate organisations recruit agencies that advise them on how to put their products ahead of others by way of creative advertising. And that is where printing firms come in.

They offer consultancies to the agencies on the best way to create catchy visual and editorial messages.

“We look at the artwork and suggest changes. Sometimes, clients have an idea of how they want an advertisement to come out but not the finer details,” says Benedicta.

Some of her top agency clients are TAC, Kraft, Exp-Momentum, Spread marketing, MCL, Dominion Outdoor, Proem, Rent Out Signs and Kenya Suitcase Limited.

From a one- woman business venture, Three Cube Printing Ltd, has recorded exponential growth, employing fifteen staff and hitting an annual turnover of more than Sh50 Million in under two years. And this, without any formal training.

No formal training
“After Form Four in 1995, the only training I have undergone is driving lessons,” confesses Benedicta. Her charm instantly creates a free environment.

“My background was very poor. We were nine in our family and though my father worked as a cook, it is my mother who paid my fees,” she says of life in Ngong, Kajiado County, where she attended Kiserian primary school and Ravals Academy, a day secondary school.

She saw her farming mother earn more than her father and this inculcated in her the love for business and not formal employment as a means to earn a living. But business would only come to her after eleven years working in outdoor advertising.

Her first contact with outdoor advertising was in 1998 when she joined Monier 2000, a leading firm, as a client service staff. “I was jobless after Form Four in 1995 and a year later, I got married and had a baby. The only job a friend of my husband could get me was receptionist,” say the amiable mother of one.

She would be exposed to high profile clients for the seven years she worked there, and as she says, Monier 2000 was to her, “a training institute”.

“I learnt a lot. I came face to face with the viciousness of contract businesses, the tough deadlines and dishonest people,” she says.

In 2005, she joined Print Express Ltd on Mombasa Road still as a customer care staff. But it is the promotion to marketing executive a year later (with a double salary) that would be her turning point.

When she was leaving four years later, she had already devised a way to accommodate such clients—she had registered her own company.

She daringly left a job when she owed a bank close to Sh2 million, the money she would use to import state of the art Chinese printing machine that prints 600sq metres of work a day.

“I want to double this output by the end of next year,” she ambitiously projects her company’s growth. Today, her staff work in 24-hour shifts and as she says, “there is a lot of work”.

I have a management style that is strict to deadlines. My staff are accustomed to customer satisfaction and they are my backbone,” she says of the young staff we find busy at her printing press.

Demand for printing services is high, she acknowledges, but there is cut-throat competition and “dirty deals” where some big players want to “take everything”.

“We depend on our creativity and timeliness of our delivery to keep us going. Otherwise, “the big boys” want to do all work,” she blatantly talks of the murky world of outdoor advertising.

Amiable and principled never to take work she will not deliver on time, Benedicta prints banners, billboards, Vinyl, floor graphics while her products include roll up stands, snapper flames branded umbrellas and staircases, telescopic flags.

She has tried her hand at the other big thing in advertising—branding of shops and walls, vehicles, shopping malls, and Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs).
Her pillars in this business? “One must be aggressive, honest and beat deadlines. Otherwise you won’t go far,” she says matter-of-factly.curtly.
Benedicta is happily married to Boniface Musila (Kachu) who is in the cosmetics industry. They have one child, Baraka.