By Syakir Nizam
When you look at this person, you will think that he is an ordinary person like us. Going to classes everyday and getting back to Mahallah. However, what makes him different from other students?
Muhammad Naeem Zaidi, 24, a final year marketing student from Kulliyyah of Economic and Management Sciences is the founder of Wowkawkaw™ Empire, a company with its own branding in food and beverages and very famous among IIUM students, called ChaNom Wowkawkaw.
This homemade drink has created its own phenomenon in IIUM Gombak campus. The offer of a reasonable price makes the students from various backgrounds affordable to purchase the drink.
The origin of his business
Every student has his or her own passion. For Naeem, this business started out of his own passion. Since he came from a family business background, starting from secondary school until his undergraduate student’s life, he had carried out a lot of business such as selling boosted drinks, providing transporter service and working as part timer at IIUM gymnasium.
But he started to have a dream to make his own branding.
According to him, this business started in 2015 when he got injured during semester 2, 2015 in a rugby game. After that incident, he started to think about a business that can build his own brand that can fulfil every segment of business.
He came out with the idea of building his own branding which he called Wowkawkaw. Next, Naeem also claimed that the emerging of his brand name came from his observation.
The name ‘Wowkawkaw’ was inspired through an impression or an expression of people when they saw a good thing, they automatically said ‘wow’ and ‘kawkaw’, he explained.
After giving the combination of those words, it became ‘Wowkawkaw’.
Naeem said, “I see the opportunity to introduce Thailand Green Tea to the IIUM community and I started to test that market when I sold green tea with 20 units during a festival at CAC last year. Praise to Allah, IIUM students can accept our drinks.”
Although he started with a small capital, he took a risk to open a small kiosk at KENMS and at that time he sold 100 units per day.
In order to succeed, we need to take a risk. According to Introduction to Business, “the biggest risk you take, the biggest achievement you will get.” That seems to be his belief and principle.
Wowkawkaw Empire’s Achievement
After a year struggling to improve this business, Wowkawkaw Empire grew rapidly. Starting with 100 units per day, this business now can obtain sales of 400 units per day with 11 workers and two kiosks.
In addition, Wowkawkaw Empire already gained two biggest achievement. First, in January 2016, they got runner up in National Entrepreneur at Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM), the national competition organised with MyPac and UUM and the latest achievement that they achieved was in Real Business Challenges in Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) organised by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOE) and they brought to home RM 2000.
When asked about the challenges faced during the Real Business Challenges, Naeem said, “On the first day, we have great difficulty selling our product, the main factor being the local people do not recognise our brand, and it became difficult for us. But after two days, the local people started to be attracted to the product and they began to accept it.”
“Basically, we can gain something if we are ready to face the challenges and work together with a team. That is the key to succeed.”
Need to have ‘Wow’ factors
Being a student, at the same time being an entrepreneur is very challenging. For Naeem, his advice is, “To be successful we need to love what we do and love what you have done, and you will get what you want.”
He added, along his journey to have this business, he always held to the three principles which are, firstly, “the need to have passion in anything that you want to do, and if you have that passion, you will love what you want to do.”
Secondly, the acronym “WOWWIN”. For “wow”, he added, “We need to have wow factor no matter who you are.”
Last but not the least, “WIN”. He claimed that WIN stands for “work hard, increase knowledge and never give up.”
So, as students, there’s the need to increase knowledge and work very hard to catch “our own dream.” It would become an easy pathway, if we try to face the obstacle. Dream high, fly high.***
photo courtesy Wowkawkaw