Stories

Colombian entrepreneur grows her business with e-commerce

27 February 2023
ITC News

Nhora Moreno's marketing consultancy helps women entrepreneurs move from trading at local fairs to selling at international markets.

Nhora Moreno's experience shows how far your business can go when you focus on your customers' needs. She helps women entrepreneurs in ethical and sustainable fashion in Colombia's Pacific region. These entrepreneurs preserve ancestral knowledge and use indigenous materials, while boosting their business skills to increase profits. They make products like accessories, belts, bags, wallets and turbans, which have become symbols of resilience, self-improvement and women's empowerment. They also make hair care products, focused on afro hairstyle.

Moreno, who lives in Cali, Colombia, found the ITC e-commerce programme SheTrades LatAm & ecomConnect. The programme showed her how to structure her methodologies to expand and deepen the services offered to her clients. That's allowed her to reach more entrepreneurs in other regions of the country, with the ultimate goal of enabling them to trade in international markets.

 

Challenges and short-term objectives

Nhora Moreno

When advising entrepreneurs, Moreno said it's important to keep learning yourself.

"The policy I apply in my business is to train myself first so that I could be able to train others and take advantage of the access to the digital world," she said. It is essential that "other entrepreneurs can learn how to manage e-commerce tools for them to find their market niche, choose the most suitable way to export, start collaborations or select the payment channel."

In the short term, Moreno wants to strengthen and structure her business’s training and consulting processes to better support entrepreneurs and help them expand their markets. Specifically, she hopes to offer this support to companies in other regions of Colombia that create valuable heritage products.

Her client Armatta, for example, is learning how to take its products to US department stores, where it can formalize commercial agreements with potential customers.

 

Applying lessons learned in the programme

As she progressed through the courses and learned about the experiences of other entrepreneurs participating in the program, who shared with each other their content creation processes for their businesses, she managed to improve the quality of her own content. For example, the program has helped her convey more clearly the values of her brand and the differentiated service she can offer her customers.

In addition, attending the SheTrades LatAm & ecomConnect program has helped her develop a habit in the content generation process to promote her consulting services online. If you would like to learn more about their services, please visit her website or their company account on Instagram.

 

Nhora Moreno's message to Latin American women entrepreneurs

Nhora Moreno understands her clients' problems and does not give up until they are solved. She also understands that the Internet has digitalized many processes and has forced companies to have an online presence. "It is key that you know the importance of the tools and methodologies needed to manage content, even if you delegate the task to someone else who has knowledge on the subject," she added.

 

About the programme

The ITC SheTrades & ecomConnect programmes launched a training programme for 1,000 women-led businesses to sell their products and services online and access national and international markets. In Colombia, ITC has launched the project in partnership with the Colombian Chamber of Electronic Commerce.

The programme supports companies in selecting a market niche, opening an online sales channel, setting up a payment solution and related logistics and implementing digital marketing techniques to increase traffic to their sales channels.

The target countries for this call are Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Uruguay. Registration for the programme is still open until 31 March 2023. For more information or to register, click here.