Online shopping is both trendy and time-saving. Instead of throwing oneself in and out of fitting rooms many choose to do the shopping from home. In Scandinavia and England the online shopping is a widespread phenomena, and now it has also begun to take off in North Cyprus.
The online store Fashonista was founded as late as in October 2015, but already has a broad customer base. Sally Sghair, the founder and initiator of Fashonista, is a young woman from England with roots from Libya.
Sally moved to Kyrenia two years ago. She thrives in Cyprus and spends her days studying and working at Grand Pasha. The idea to start up the online store came from her own need of nice and price worthy clothes, something that she had a hard time finding in the Cyprus clothes stores.
“In Istanbul they have so much good shopping, but here in Cyprus I have a hard time finding what I’m looking for,” Sally explains, “Therefore I came up with the idea to open up my own store, with imported clothes of international brands.”
At the moment she is looking for a good place in central Kyrenia to set up her store for a reasonable rent. The plan is to open up the store within two months. Until then one can order clothes of her Facebook-page; Fashionista.
“The idea is that the customers will be able to buy clothes from the store as well as the online store on Facebook,” Sally says.
She also explains that this is exactly how women in Libya ordered and sold clothes of international brands before they were accessible in their country.
Even though Fashionista only has existed a couple of months the page has rapidly become widespread among the women on the island. Sally imports the clothes from London and most of them are trendy party dresses, but since the demand has increased, she will also start importing casual wear. Shoes, bags and swim wear are other new things we can look forward to buying from Fashionista in the near future.
“The clothes are of high quality for reasonable prices. It should be nice and price worthy. I don’t bring in more than two or three samples of each attire, Cyprus is so small and you shouldn’t need to risk getting to a party in the same outfit as somebody else.”
When Sally gets a new clothing delivery she puts the clothes on Fashionista’s Facebook page. She gets requests from interested customers immediately. Some of them want to come home to Sally to try on the clothes before buying, others order the clothes straight home to their front door. You get two weeks of purchase on approval.
Fashionista’s customers consists of girls in their late teens to fashionistas in their forties. Many of them work in casinos, where you are required to wear formal attire.
Sally is positive about the future, the only big challenge, really, is to find a good and smooth way to deliver the clothes from London to North Cyprus. But even in rough times she knows she has her boyfriend standing by her side, he was the one who encouraged her to follow her dream and open up the business in the first place.
“North Cyprus is a good place for those who want to open up their own business, there are great possibilities here for smaller business activities to grow, you don’t get pushed down by bigger businesses,” Sally says.
