From a Bedroom Hobby to a Registered Business: How Deborah Aguinem turned her informal crocheting into the Stitch With Eabel Brand
Before March 2026, Deborah Aguinem was a young Nigerian crocheter with an informal Telegram page and a skill she was yet to build up as a business. Today, she is the registered owner of STITCH WITH EABEL ENTERPRISES – a fully branded crochet academy and luxury accessories label with a tax identification number, a website and an online shop, a 12-month revenue roadmap projecting over ₦6 million (around £3,298.92), a business plan, and a five-year vision to become a household crochet brand.
What changed between these timelines, and why is it significant beyond Deborah?
The Beginning: Why Deborah
When we launched the call for submissions for the Blooming Ventures Programme late last year, succeeding our earlier #Street2Startup initiative, we set out to find a street-involved, underserved young Nigerian entrepreneur whose passion, commitment, and talent could be formalised and scaled with the right support. Deborah Aguinem, the founder of Eabel Domain – an informal crocheting academy- was named our inaugural Ambassador. She received a ₦500,000 (around £280) seed grant and twelve weeks of dedicated business development coaching from Ubong Inyang, a 2015 Tony Elumelu Foundation entrepreneur and seasoned startup coach.
This is a story of a young entrepreneur given structure and what she built with it.
The Twelve-Week Journey
The programme’s structured mentorship followed a deliberate curriculum developed by Ubong. It took Deborah through entrepreneurial mindset and vision, problem and opportunity identification, value proposition design, customer segmentation, product development, business model design, branding and identity, pricing strategy, marketing, financial basics, partnerships and legal structuring, and finally scaling for community impact.
Finding her vision. In week one, Deborah was asked a simple question: where do you want this business to be in five years? Her answer set the tone for everything that followed — not just a crochet hobby earning pocket money, but a learning hub empowering young women with a skill and a livelihood.
Testing assumptions against reality. Midway through the programme, Deborah conducted her first market survey. This involved going out into her community and asking real people what they thought of her work. It was not easy. “It was like trying to cross another milestone of talking to people about my business,” she reflected. The survey reached 22 respondents and produced findings that reshaped her entire strategy. Asked directly whether they would pay more for something handmade and unique, 73% said yes and the remaining 27% said maybe — not a single respondent said no. Deborah had been pricing her bags well below what her own market was telling her it was willing to pay. From her conversations while administering the survey, she also observed that enthusiasm for learning crochet skewed heavily toward teenagers rather than the working-class women and mothers she had originally assumed were her core market — a field insight that prompted her to rethink who her Academy should be built for first.
Learning to sell with intention. When the programme reached marketing strategy, Deborah’s own words captured the shift in her thinking with striking clarity: “Marketing is not random noise made to get attention. It is specific, and its end goal is sales. If I haven’t got people to notice and buy my products, my marketing strategy needs to be worked on.” Her reflection shows a founder already diagnosing her business with intentionality.
Building a real go-to-market plan. Deborah developed concrete, channel-specific strategies for reaching her earliest customers. Each channel came with its own goal, its own tactics, and its own pitch — evidence of a mind that had moved from making things to building a market for them.
Becoming a brand. What began as a personal Telegram page under Eabel Domain became Stitch With Eabel — a fully realised brand identity with a defined colour palette of purple for creativity and confidence, cream for elegance, and gold for quality. The branding also comprised a professional logo and a thoughtful packaging concept that turns every delivery into a branded customer experience, complete with a QR code linking customers directly to leave reviews.
Writing the business plan. By the programme’s later weeks, Deborah had produced a complete business plan — defining three lines of business across a Crochet Academy with tiered learning tracks for teens, advanced, and professional students, a Luxe handmade product line spanning bags, headwear, and custom gifts, and a digital products stream including DIY guides and starter kits. She built a detailed pricing and revenue model projecting an estimated ₦6.15 to ₦6.65 million (£3,656) in annual revenue and set herself concrete year-one targets: training at least 80 students, selling over 60 bags and 60 headwear pieces, and building an Instagram following of over 1,000.
Making it official. On 12 May 2026, Deborah formally registered STITCH WITH EABEL ENTERPRISES with Nigeria’s Corporate Affairs Commission, receiving a Business Name Registration Number and a Tax Identification Number. What started as a craft hobby now exists, in the eyes of Nigerian law, as a business.
The Outputs: What Twelve Weeks Produced
Beyond the curriculum and the coaching conversations, the Blooming Ventures Programme produced a set of concrete and verifiable deliverables.
A new identity – from Eabel Domain to Stitch With Eabel: Deborah entered the Programme operating under the informal name Eabel Domain. Through the branding and identity module, she worked through a full naming and positioning exercise, considering options including Eabel Crochet Studio, Eabel Hands, Eabel Craft Hub, and Made by Eabel, before settling on Stitch With Eabel — a name that is warmer, more specific to her craft, and more memorable than her original brand. The rename was paired with a defined visual identity: a purple, cream, and gold palette signalling creativity, elegance, and quality, a professionally designed logo, and a thoughtful packaging concept featuring a QR code linking customers directly to a review page. The brand now carries the tagline “Small Pieces… Big Smiles.”
A live website and e-commerce store: Stitch With Eabel now has a fully functioning website at stitchwitheabel.com, built during the Programme period. The site features a complete brand story, a structured Crochet Academy offering varied tracks for Teens, Advanced, and an upcoming Crochetpreneurs, a live online shop with working cart and checkout functionality, real-priced products including tote bags, headwear, and purses, customer testimonials, an FAQ section, and a dedicated page acknowledging Blooming Social Pen Trust Initiative’s support. What existed three months ago as a Telegram page now exists as a fully realised, professional online business with the infrastructure to sell, teach, and grow independently of any single social platform.
Research translated directly into product strategy. The market research finding on teenage learner enthusiasm was a critical insight, and it quickly became actioned. Deborah prioritised it, building and recording the introductory teaching videos for her Teens Crochet Class first — the track is now live on the Stitch With Eabel website as the Academy’s flagship beginner offering. This is a clear, traceable line from a single survey insight to a concrete product decision within the same twelve-week period. It is exactly the kind of evidence-to-action loop the Programme was designed to instil.
Growth in social reach. Deborah’s YouTube following grew from 17 to 30 subscribers over the three-month programme period — a 76 percent increase. While modest in absolute numbers, this growth reflects the early traction of a consistent content strategy built during the marketing module, and YouTube is now one of three social platforms, alongside Instagram and TikTok, that Stitch With Eabel actively uses to reach students and customers.
A completed business plan with real financial modelling. Deborah produced a full business plan covering her three lines of business, a four-stream revenue model projecting an estimated ₦6.15 to ₦6.65 million in annual revenue, a detailed annual budget allocating her seed grant across workspace setup, equipment, content production, materials, and business registration, and a three-stage growth plan extending to 2029, including ambitions to reach the export market.
What This Tells Us
Deborah’s journey from informal hobbyist to registered entrepreneur in twelve weeks demonstrates something the Blooming Ventures Programme set out to prove: that the gap between informal hustle and formal enterprise in Nigeria is not a gap of talent or ambition. It is a gap of structure, mentorship, and modest capital, deployed with intention.
Deborah arrived with the skill and the drive. What the Programme provided was the scaffolding — a coach who had walked the entrepreneurial path himself, a curriculum that moved systematically from mindset to market to money, and a small seed grant deployed at exactly the right moments to convert learning into formal action.
The transformation is measurable. At baseline, Deborah had an unregistered hobby business with three students, no formal pricing strategy, no documented target market, and no legal existence. Twelve weeks later, she has a registered company with a tax ID, a defined brand, a costed business plan, a five-stream revenue model, and a clear three-stage growth plan extending to 2029.
What’s Next for Stitch With Eabel
Deborah’s own growth plan looks well beyond the programme’s twelve weeks. Over the coming year, she is focused on building her Telegram academy, completing her landing page, producing tutorial video content, and forging connections with schools, NYSC skill acquisition programmes, and youth groups. In the following stages, she plans to launch branded starter kits, build boutique and content creator partnerships, and eventually reposition into the premium and export markets — carrying handmade Nigerian craftsmanship to a global audience.
Blooming Social Pen Trust Initiative will continue to track Stitch With Eabel’s progress as a flagship case study of what focused, well-structured entrepreneurship support can achieve. We are proud to have walked the first twelve weeks of this journey with Deborah, and prouder still to watch where she takes it next.
The Blooming Ventures Programme is an initiative of Blooming Social Pen Trust Initiative, supporting underserved and street-involved young Nigerian entrepreneurs through seed funding and structured business development coaching. Deborah Aguinem is our inaugural Programme Ambassador.
