There are more than 30 million entrepreneurs in Brazil, and only 10 million are women. When it comes to small and medium-sized companies in digital retail, however, the game changes: 57% of businesses are led by women.
One of them is businesswoman Ana Paula Xongani, who began her journey in 2009, founding an online accessories store alongside her mother. The e-commerce gained a physical store, Ateliê Xongani, specialized in Afro-Brazilian fashion, in 2015, the year in which Ana Paula began creating – about entrepreneurship and, later, adding social issues, such as blackness, female empowerment, education and beauty.
“Today, when I talk about other subjects, inevitably the social issues of entrepreneurship are transversal”, he explains. “I didn’t start talking about everything. Today I talk about many topics, which commercially is extremely advantageous. But they were built one by one”, he adds.
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Ateliê Xongani is undergoing a rebranding process, with the aim of becoming an educational arm of the Xongani ecosystem. And today the entrepreneur’s main source of income is herself: her personal brand Ana Paula Xongani.
Graduated in Interior Design, Xongani has deepened her repertoire in the last ten years with a postgraduate degree in Journalism and Communication and technical training in TV Presentation.
The businesswoman explains that the investment in her education and the acquired knowledge were essential for her rise, to the point that her personal brand, today, employs 50 people, directly and indirectly, considering personal consultancy and ten other consultancies, which take care of her health, image, accounting and legal issues, as well as advertising partners.
Creating a community
Xongani has built a loyal base of more than 300,000 followers, including Instagram and TikTok, which does not seem so significant compared to other influencers, but has still enabled contracts with major brands, such as Nestlé, Natura, Reckitt brands, such as Veja, etc.
The entrepreneur was also the first native digital talent to join the VIU portfolio, an area dedicated to talent management and commercial projects between brands and content creators, at TV Globo, in addition to being a guest editor at Companhia das Letras, collaborating with the curation of titles that expand diversity in the publisher’s catalog.
With more than 10 years of digital life, Xongani says that staying relevant for so long is a big challenge and advises anyone looking to follow in his footsteps to expand and evolve the themes portrayed on social media without leaving interaction aside – even if their profile grows.
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One of the topics added to her networks was matters related to the house, which came from the influencer’s careful observation of her audience, which is mostly female. “My audience has studied, worked and is in the process of buying or renting a house and furnishing it. They want to know about this, but from someone who has racial literacy, who doesn’t ignore social issues”, he explains.
But, even though it is the formula for remaining relevant over time, the expansion of topics portrayed by the influencer alone will not bring them closer to the audience, whether old or new, who ask for interactions that deliver something.
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“The influencer needs to deliver beyond the video. People want to know which product you used, where you bought it, which book you read to gain this knowledge and which spreadsheet you used to organize your finances. Therefore, one of the innovations in my content is the automation of responses on my social networks. If someone wants to know which spreadsheet I used, just write “spreadsheet” and a response will be sent. This is a way I found to continue delivering a service”, he adds.
TV X internet
Before her digital life, Xongani worked as a presenter and mediator for panels and festivals. For her, the current movement of influencers composing television programs can be done assertively: the secret lies in the “middle of the road” of a structure that encompasses both universes, TV and Internet.
“On the internet, the way you speak usually has a faster intonation, to capture the audience’s attention. On TV, if you speak at the same pace, you could end up blowing the microphone. Therefore, it is essential to understand these adaptations, both in audio and video, and find a balance in the language that works for both media. This middle ground is what will allow formats originally designed for the internet to be successfully migrated to TV, and vice versa”, he explains.
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Another error that Xongani finds in productions that mix the two worlds is ignoring one of them at the moment of conception. “It is necessary to think, from the beginning, when building the program or project, about how it will work both on the internet and on TV. The product becomes crude when they forget this, create the content thinking about only one of the media and only adapt it for the other. So, before even opening the camera, it is essential to plan the program already considering both languages. At the time of recording, it must be captured for both media”, he concludes.
