SA’s answer to Kylie Jenner
Rabia left school at 14 to start her own online beauty company. Six years later the money’s rolling in
AT the age of 20 many young people don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives and are still dependent on Mom and Dad for everything from a roof over their head to food on the table. But not Rabia Ghoor. This go-getter has been running her own business since the age of 14 – and just six years later her little enterprise has grown into a seven-figure company that employs seven people and ships around 3 000 orders a month.
Rabia has been described as South Africa’s answer to Kylie Jenner because, like the youngest member of the Kardashian Jenner clan, she too is making her mark in the beauty game.
She’s the creator and owner of Swiitch Beauty, an online beauty product store she developed from her bedroom in her family home in Laudium, Pretoria, when she was barely in high school.
“The beauty scene on YouTube was just starting to boom and around the same time I’d just got my first smartphone,” she tells us via video call. “I’d spend hours on the app watching tutorials and reviews and immersing myself in general beauty banter.”
She became obsessed with creating her own beauty line, she says. “School was never fun for me. All of a sudden I had this side hustle that I really enjoyed.”
But school was getting in the way, she found. “It was taking up so much of my time. I’d work on the business till 4am then have to be up at 6am to go to school.
“My time management was bad and my grades were definitely worse off for it.”
Initially Rabia was doing everything by herself – product formulation, marketing her business through social media, packaging and managing orders.
The demands of a growing business caught up with her and she decided her only option was dropping out of school.
She was terrified of telling her parents, but when she finally plucked up the courage she found they were behind her all the way. By then she was 16 and in Grade 10 so legally she could leave school – and in her case it just made sense, she says.
“My parents were my biggest supporters. Their unwavering faith in me was central to developing my confidence – they believed I could do this, so I believed I could too.
“My ideas were only ever met with positive pushes in the right direction.”
‘Making money as a kid for the first time is redemptive’
ENTREPRENEURSHIP is in Rabia’s DNA. She started hustling when she was still at primary school at Al Ghazali College, an independent Islamic school in Centurion, Gauteng. She’d sell stickers and mini buckets to classmates to use as rubbish bins on their desks. Her interest in the beauty business grew as she approached her teens until it became an all-consuming passion.
For the first 14 months after leaving school Rabia isolated from her friends and threw everything into getting Swiitch Beauty – a name she came up with on a whim – off the ground.
There were many moments she felt like giving up. “You’re just like, ‘What am I doing?’, and ‘What are people going to think?’ It’s become so easy for entrepreneurs to make things look rosy on social media when in reality there are extreme amounts of impostor syndrome and burnout periods that are almost crippling.”
But she knew if she didn’t put in the work she wouldn’t get anywhere and this realisation helped her push through her lowest moments.
“I had to prove myself 10 times more than kids who finished school and went out and got degrees and stable jobs,” she says. “That was my motivation.”
Her parents left her to it and didn’t get involved, she says – and she’s glad they didn’t as she knew this was all on her.
“So I hibernated in Swiitch, barely going to any social meetings or anything. It was a real development point.”
And slowly but surely things started to happen. Rabia remembers her first sale as if it were yesterday. A customer called Janei ordered one of the first products she designed: a silicone makeup-brush cleaning device. Although similar devices are available on the market today, there was nothing like it available back in 2015, she says.
Bursting with excitement, Rabia sat beside her dad as they drove to the post office to post the product to Janei.
“I wrote her name on three different envelopes before picking the one that looked neatest and packing up her order,” she recalls. At the time I hadn’t yet discovered hand [to hand] couriers.”
Rabia borrowed R6 000 from her father to use as capital when she began her business but “I haven’t borrowed a cent from anyone since”, she says.
In 2016 she started outsourcing manufacturing and hired two employees to help manage the growing business.
Rabia’s role shifted to focusing on research and development, and if the need arose for specialised expertise that would require money she didn’t have, she simply found ways to work around it.
“If I couldn’t pay for a developer I learnt how to code. If I couldn’t afford a graphic designer, I’d find a graphic design app.
“I taught myself to do a lot of things to avoid outsourcing. Everything seems intimidating until you learn it or until you understand it.”
HER makeup line has grown to include eyeshadows, powders, makeup utensils and even skincare products, all of which are sold online. Like the true Gen Z baby she is, Rabia primarily uses social media as a tool to market her products.
“Instagram has been a massive player in our growth over the past five years. We have 90 000 followers today,” she says.
When the money started rolling in, Rabia says it was incredibly liberating.
“I was always selling stuff at school and hustling for pocket money as a kid,” she says. “Making money as a kid for the first time is redemptive. Your newfound independence fuels all kinds of growth.”
In an industry this competitive, it’s important to have a good sense of self, she says.
“You need to have a firm understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing. The ‘why’ is your anchor.”
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. She has her fair share of detractors and recalls an incident where a troll questioned the quality of Swiitch’s products because of Rabia’s age.
“Someone posted a comment on Facebook that said, ‘You guys do know that a 15-year-old is making the stuff you put on your face, right?’ ”
But Rabia quickly learnt to let negativity wash over her.
“There’ll always be haters,” she says. “But I’m grateful to have had a lot of people pushing me along the way.”
Her products retail from R45 to R350 an item, priced to suit the pockets of her young clientele. Like many small businesses, her enterprise took a knock during the hard lockdown and it was a real shock, she says.
“I thought, ‘What am I going to do?’ But I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to afford to put the safety of my employees first.”
Now the orders are coming in again and Rabia believes her business has yet to hit its peak.
For that to happen, she has one requirement: “Chicken Licken is my dream endorsement,” she says of the fast food chain beloved by many young South Africans.
“I’ll have peaked once I bag that!”