Selling destination Kenya

Nana Wanjiku Gecaga passes for the average Nairobi girl until she starts talking and tells you what she does for a living. 

At the age of 12, Nana Wanjiku Gecaga was found to be dyslexic, which means she had trouble learning at normal pace in school but that was never to stop her from becoming what she wanted.

Now this 29-year old husky-voiced entrepreneur is rubbing shoulders with real celebs and actually making a decent living out of it while promoting Kenya as a tourist destination.

Over coffee in a city hotel, Wanjiku — she was once a DJ at Westlands’ Pavement Restaurant — tells us that her parents transferred her from Kenya to a specialised school in the UK, where she could be given the special treatment she needed but which she couldn’t get locally. 

That would be the beginning of her present status because as she went through her studies in the UK and later in the US, her network of friends turned out to be people with connections to the celebrity world, and soon, she was getting invites to house parties and events where she would meet Hollywood glitterati.

A big smile brightens Wanjiku’s face when we ask her about the finer details. It is as if she is saying, “I was expecting that”.

When she explains, it turns out that a combination of fate and making friends with the right connections cleared the path for her. 

She is a charming woman, and it is not surprising she would win friends in high society. That she was also once two-time 100 and 200 metres sprint champion for two years in a row during high school in New England boosted her popularity.

Later, as she was winding up her university studies, negative publicity about Kenya would stir her up into thinking about doing something that would project Kenya positively.

She explains: “My friends would always come asking, ‘Did you hear this and that about Kenya?’ Most of the time it would be about some negative report. A few years of that can really get to you,” she says.

“When I started thinking about how to help change that image, the idea of marketing the country to celebrities hit me because I had already been in contact with some of them.” 

Wanjiku shared the idea with her friend Nathalie Dubois, who had already penetrated the gifting market, and naturally, Dubois encouraged her to follow the same path. 

Wanjiku — she is about to make her first million—  founded Bora Ubora and signed an agreement with Dubois to be part of her gifting lounge at the Emmys last year.

The gifting business entails presenting celebs and the rich with free holiday packages in return of the boost they give to the destination by dint of their fame and popularity.

“That’s how I got into the Emmys,” says Wanjiku. Her suite must have been an attraction because Dubois kept her in this year’s Golden Globes Awards.

An Internet site, which discusses Dubois as an exemplary gift lounge host, also features Wanjiku as representing Africa during the Golden Globes event. 

It is about 18 months since she entered into the celebrity world proper with the gifting strategy. By next year, she says, she wants to have made at least her first million.

Wanjiku’s eyes sparkle on recalling how Hollywood star, Terence Howard, strolled into her gifting suite in the company of Diana Ross’s son and after pleasantries, eased himself on the seat and asked her, “Tell me all you know about Kenya.”

Howard is an Oscar nominee, a winner of 18 other awards and a total of 28 nominations. You may recall him for his role in the 2005 popular movie Crash, but if you missed that, try TV shows like The Cosby Show, Living Single, Family Matters, NYPD Blue, Soul Food, and Picket Fences, which have all been aired locally, and you will get an idea of the kind of person Wanjiku is trying to woo to come to Kenya for holiday, and understand her excitement about it.

“He was very fascinated. He is a very charming guy and he was really interested in Kenya,” says Wanjiku.

Clad in a simple yellow and black kanga overcoat she has made herself, and a matching head band, Wanjiku may look simple at the Thorn Tree Restaurant, but she really isn’t so when her connections with the world of celebrities and what she is doing with them emerges.

A rapid, confident talker

Howard’ visited her celebrity suite in January during the Golden Globe celebrity award ceremony in Los Angeles. Wanjiku, had penetrated the prestigious celebrity gift lounge for the event, and got herself a suite that gave her express access to virtually every celebrity attending the event. 

Her memories about Howard’s visit stand out because the rising star expressed deep interest in Kenya. A rapid, confident talker Wanjiku must have rolled out quite a sales pitch to keep Howard in her celebrity gift suite. 

She will, however, not reveal whether Howard will be among a number of Hollywood celebrities she expects to host for holiday in Kenya at different times towards the end of this year. Privacy and security considerations  do not allow her to talk about details yet. 

In her business, she has met actress Sharon Stone, last year’s Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, Djimon Hounsou of Blood Diamonds, Loretta Devine of Dream Girls, actress Pamela Anderson and a host of other icons whom she entertained in her gift suite at the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles for the 2007 Golden Globe Awards, and at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, France, during the Cannes Film Festival 2007 in May.

Wanjiku had a similar experience at the Emmy Awards in August last year when she first gained entry into the world of gifting celebrities during high profile award ceremonies and festivals, thanks to Dubois.

Dubois’ gift lounges are respected and it is within these that Wanjiku markets mostly select Kenyan destinations and a few other African places.

The gifting of celebrities has become a fixture in celebrity gatherings, and no event of such nature will, nowadays, go without a gift lounge being set up next at the venue for attending celebrities to visit and be showered with gifts from participating companies. 

Gifting of celebrated personalities is, in essence, a marketing strategy. Their ownership of and being photographed with such products is read as an endorsement of quality. A lot of companies out there do it and almost jostle for attention of these internationally-acclaimed personalities.

That’s the concept that Wanjiku has aggressively tapped into and is using her presence in these prestigious award ceremonies to present Hollywood stars and other celebrities with gift travel packages to select destinations in Kenya. And hers is a combination of attention for business and charity.

Whether these people use the packages being offered by properties such as Diani Reef Beach Resort and Spa, Heritage Management Ltd, and Sarova Group among others, is another thing, but indications are that many of them are keen on Kenya as a travel and holiday destination, going by Wanjiku’s hint that several will have visited before the close of the year. 

“Most of them get excited about Kenya and each seems to be saying, ‘show me more. I can’t wait to go somewhere new’,” says Wanjiku.

According to her, a good number of these high profile personalities tend to go to the Caribbean for holidays every so often, but she is of the opinion that Kenya is a competitive alternative.

That is the reason she has lately been talking to these people through her luxury travel service, Bora Ubora, which will again have a presence at the Venice Film Festival from August 29 to September 8 as part of the official gift lounge team. 

Wanjiku, who is based in the UK, has been around for the past few weeks to lay groundwork for the possible visits by a host of celebrities before the end of the year, as she also goes about marketing her ideas to luxury property owners. 

A person of many sympathies (which she calls her main weakness) and the reason she is also marketing charity to celebrities, Wanjiku is using her success to demonstrate that dyslexia is not a serious disorder, but minor setback that can be overcome through special attention. 

That’s precisely what has happened to her. 

“Being dyslexic does not mean one cannot excel. In fact, dyslexic people simply think differently and often, they are creative,” she says.

And creative she must be to have come up with an outfit such as Bora Ubora that is small yet penetrating big markets. Wanjiku gets lots of attention from holiday property owners when she is around because she is fast gaining fame as the human gateway to the coveted celebrity market. 

Having been named a part of the official gift lounge for the coming Venice Film Festival, Wanjiku is destined to broaden her outreach in the celebrity world, and who knows, soon the faces of the people we only get to see and admire on the big screens may become a regular visitors to Kenya as they take charity holidays. 

“At Venice, we will be located directly opposite where celebrities will come through and that’s a good position,” says this young woman who holds a degree in advertising and marketing and another in fashion marketing. 

Charity is important to her, which is also the reason she will participate at the Cinema Verite in Monaco and Paris in October this year.

Cinema Verite is an event that encourages film-makers who highlight social and humanitarian issues to continue pressing their change agenda, and it does attract the top personalities in the world film industry. 

Among the holiday packages she offers as gifts to celebrated stars, are visits to charity institutions, and she has a whole list of them, which is why she is excited that Ivana Trump, the wife of Donald Trump — that stern American billionaire host of the reality TV show, The Apprentice — was particularly keen on charity when she met her at the Cannes Film Festival.

A true Kenyan experience

“Ivana Trump is really nice. The first thing she wanted to know was about charity.”

From her base in the UK, Wanjiku periodically comes to Kenya to sample luxury products that she deems fit to be marketed to VIPs. She assesses the uniqueness of the properties in terms of providing a true Kenyan experience while at the same time maintaining quality standards that are befitting of a celebrity. 

She has spent considerable chunk of her current visit in Mombasa and Maasai Mara Game Reserve, not only to enjoy her favourite “Fanta Black Currant and steak in potatoes, but for business too.”

Wanjiku’s visits are usually followed by convincing selected and interested properties to offer gift packages to people in the target market as bait. This is meant to entice the targeted people in the hope that they will get hooked and make several return visits. That then serves as an endorsement for more people to get interested in visiting the same places.

So far, she has managed to use her strategy to gift 95 celebrity and VIP personalities with a few holiday packages to Kenya for a minimum of 10 days. 

“My concept is simple,” she says happily, “And my agenda is three-fold. The first is to give Kenya a positive image out there. The second is to get the high net worth clientele, and thirdly, I work with Kenyan properties to give them exposure abroad. That, really, is my vision. I want Kenya to be discussed not as the top 10 countries not to go to, but as the top 10 destinations to visit,” says Wanjiku.

She will not talk about the man in her life, her famous family and the car she drives.