My brand name was my bully name in school Jennifer Umeh, owner Blinky Collections

By Abdulfatah Last updated Oct 22, 2019

PASCAL OPARADA

How do you convert what once caused you pain to something that is a major source of income for you?

Not many have had the strength or nerve to rise from the taunts and piercing laughter of schoolmates and use the same object of pain and make a success of it.

That is what Chinonye Jennifer Umeh, an entrepreneur and owner of Blinky Collections, did.

“If you look at me very well, you will notice that I blink frequently and that was what people used to taunt and mock me at school,” she said with a chuckle.

According to her, she courted trouble the day she jocularly asked a supposedly big boy at school to drop some of his responsibilities for others.

“He was the course rep and also vying for a post with the student union in school. And you can’t joggle those responsibilities and be effective at the same time,” she said.

According to her, the big boy began to spread vicious rumours about her in school and invented the name blinky as a way to get back at her.

“Initially, I did not realize I was the one people were referring to as blinky until a classmate drew my attention to it.

“It was devastating for me because I never knew that the mumblings and murmurings were all meant for me,” Umeh said.

“The bullying was so severe that I would skip class for weeks and that caused me to fail woefully in one semester. A lot of thoughts ran through my mind.

“Sometimes, immediately I entered the school gate, the bullying would start and I would run back home,” she said.

She decided to end it all by taking her own life. She bought the dreaded insecticide, Sniper, after making a post on Facebook about ending her life.

“Someone I knew on social media, a lawyer, reached out to me after reading my suicide posts on Facebook and sent a psychologist to me,” she said, as she looked away at the sun shining through on rooftop of the eatery where the interview was held.

She said was taken into seclusion and treated for depression by the psychologists.

Some of her classmates who had noticed her downward spiral decided to cheer up by suggesting that she adopts the name as a brand.

“They made several suggestions. Some said the name is very good and suitable for business, especially in fashion. Some called it Blinky Smart, Blinky this, Blinky that,” said.

That was when she gathered up courage and went to a market at Ilorin, the Kwara State capital, and bought a T-shirt and gave to a shirt designer to print Blinky on it.

“But I couldn’t get to boldly wear it at school. I put a cardigan over it until one of my coursemates noticed and took the cardigan off. I was mortified and thought the bullying would increase, but to my shock, that shirt ended everything,” she said.

The bullying stopped and other people came to ask her to make similar Tees for them and she would charge them a token. Like wildfire, the name blinky spread at school, this time as a brand name even winning her a campaign contract at school to design shirts.

“I decided to learn how to do screen printing from the guy who designed my first tee back in school,” she said as she squinted and laughed.

That birthed the brightest business idea she has today. Jennifer makes t-shirts for political campaigns, individuals, and for corporate bodies.

According to her, she gets orders from outside the country from people she knows nothing about whom she met only on social media.

“As I sit here, I have orders from Rwanda, which has been paid for upfront, that I have not started to even work on because of backlog of orders, she said with a smile.

The graduate of the Federal Polytechnic offa has another passion. She wants to use philanthropy, which she calls Blink against Bullying to reach people who are being bullied or those whose lives have been affected by bullies.

The former campus correspondent of The Nation Newspapers said she has never been idle even as an undergraduate.

“I have always been busy, using my smartphone to make money. Sometimes, I will manage social media accounts of some companies or individuals,” she said.

At a point she was a campus newspaper publisher and tried her hands on several things.

“I have always been a hustler,” she said in one of her Facebook posts.

Jennifer advised undergraduates not be idle and hope for non-existent jobs when they leave school.

“My greatest fear post-university have been how to find a job. I once got a job in a beauty salon, after my youth service, where I was not even allowed to pick my calls. When they told me to stop coming, I thought that was the end of the world,” she said.

But her spiritedness made her weather that storm. She concentrated on building Blinky Collections brand even when she was ejected from an apartment she shared with a family.

According to her, she leveraged the power of social media in a positive way to make success of her brand.

“Don’t underestimate the power of the internet. Rather than stay idle, youths should scour the internet for what they can do and legitimately make money from,” she said.

“Social media has helped me as person and as an entrepreneur. The success I am seeing in my business today is because of the power of social media. It is a great tool.”