I build DTC channels that make money.
I built Nigeria's first locally manufactured sports nutrition brand, grew it 3.2× in a year, and run it with a team of six. Now I do the same for other brands: Shopify builds, paid acquisition, and the backend systems nobody wants to touch.
What I actually do
Three things. I've done all of them hands-on, and I now run teams that do them.
Shopify builds, WhatsApp commerce, whatever the business actually needs. A storefront is one channel, not the whole of DTC. Offer and bundle architecture, long-form product pages, CRO. Not templates.
Meta, TikTok, Google, AI search, and offline through event activations. Anywhere your customers are. Managed to a cost-per-purchase target, not to impressions, with the discipline to kill what isn't working.
Inventory, order flow, POS, ERP migrations, warehousing and fulfilment, WhatsApp automation. The layer that decides whether a growing store survives its own growth.
I've delivered client work with a team of two full-time staff and up to five contractors, and I run Retaur day to day with two full-time and four contract. I still write the code and read the ad account, which is why briefs I hand out are specific and why I can tell when work is off.
The work
I couldn't find affordable sports nutrition while training for a marathon, so I started importing it. Then I stopped importing and built Nigeria's first locally manufactured sports nutrition brand: protein yogurts, flavoured creatine and performance drinks.
Imported supplements were priced out of reach and nobody was manufacturing in the category locally. The import model had no margin and no moat.
Pivoted to local manufacturing and took the whole P&L. Sourced protein concentrate from a European supplier, set COGS and margin structure, and built the DTC store as the primary channel.
On acquisition, I ran the Meta account end to end and structured it around a warm-audience engine feeding cold prospecting stacks. I also rebuilt the offer itself: bundles and post-purchase upsells that lift average order value and gross profit per order, which is what makes the CAC sustainable. Cheap traffic doesn't save a thin order; a bigger order makes expensive traffic affordable.
On distribution, the same social spend that drove online sales built enough brand recognition to get us onto retail shelves.
On the organisation, I recruited a co-founder for sales and distribution and structured his equity, vesting and performance terms myself. I'm developing an operations lead toward owning sales and operations planning, and hiring into finance. I manage the contract manufacturer, a European ingredient supplier, a logistics partner and outside counsel. I built the financial model and raised debt against it.
Molekule wanted to know whether their existing page was leaving money on the table. I built a challenger page from scratch and ran it against their control for four months.
“Loved working with Collins. He was very receptive to all feedback provided and quickly incorporated it. He would also respectfully push back on items if he felt they would impact conversions. Truly skilled.”
A children's retailer selling online, in store, and through social, with a different stock count in each. Three channels, three versions of the truth, and no single source of inventory. The catalogue was far too large to migrate by hand, and a store-wide tax misconfiguration was affecting every product.
I implemented Odoo POS end to end and built an integration that runs retail, ecommerce and social commerce off one inventory. Wrote a five-phase Node.js migration for roughly 8,000 SKUs with a checkpoint ledger and controlled concurrency, so a failure mid-run resumed instead of restarting. Cleared the tax misconfiguration across the full catalogue via an XML-RPC script, with a rollback backup built first. Wrote a 24-page staff manual covering POS and inventory workflows.
A clinician-led women's health brand selling supplements direct, with a WhatsApp service for prescription questions. Ad spend was going to pages that weren't built to sell. No offer structure, no trust architecture, and in a category where buyers are private and sceptical, that's fatal.
I built the product page as a bundle landing page engineered to move buyers to the three-bottle option:
Live and selling. The bundle architecture raises average order value structurally rather than through discounting.
“Collins built our product page and it changed how the business performs. He understands what makes people buy, not just how to build a page. He's really good at what he does.”
Olam's healthy snacking brand had no direct-to-consumer channel at all. I built one from scratch as a social commerce operation, taking orders directly through Instagram and TikTok rather than routing everything to a website. Ran the content, the acquisition and the order flow.
Collaglo had a designed site and needed someone to actually build it. I built the entire store on Shopify from scratch to their design, with no theme shortcuts.
Live at collaglo.comProducts I've built
Merchants here sell over WhatsApp, but their store, inventory and orders live somewhere else — so orders get typed by hand out of chat threads. Slow, error-prone, impossible to scale.
I designed, built and shipped a Shopify app connecting WhatsApp commerce to the store backend. Migrated the integration from Shopify's REST API to GraphQL with 242 passing tests. Took it through App Store review, including resolving a rejection on test credentials and pricing display, and built the go-to-market: landing page, marketing assets, privacy policy.
View on the App StoreF6C Auto proved the demand but was tied to Shopify. Kwota is the standalone version: a multi-tenant platform connecting merchants to WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, with pluggable backend adapters for Zoho, Odoo and Shopify — so a merchant's commerce backend is a config choice rather than a rewrite.
It includes a supplier network layer: any tenant can publish a wholesale catalogue and let resellers sell it, with fulfilment routing and serviceability checks handled by the platform.
I'm Collins Mbaka
I run an FMCG brand with a team of six, and I build DTC systems for other brands.
When I talk about CAC, margin or cash flow, it's from running a business on those numbers, not from a deck. I hire, I set targets, and I own the outcome when they're missed.
When the tool doesn't exist, I build it.
I'm open to ecommerce, growth and DTC operator roles. UAE, remote, or GMT to GMT+4.
Download CV (PDF)