On a Tuesday afternoon in Surulere, six women are waiting outside Adunni Tailoring House. Three are holding fabric in plastic bags. One is on the phone, defending her place in the queue. Adunni Bakare's shop is 14 square metres and has, for nearly a year, been booked solid through October.
Six years ago she was sewing on a borrowed Singer in her aunt's spare room. Now she has nine staff, a waitlist, and — more surprising to her than anyone — a Verified ribbon next to her name on a directory site she only signed up to "to see what would happen."
A meeting on a sewing-machine table
We meet on the only flat surface in the shop: the cutting table, cleared of its usual chiffon rolls for the occasion. Adunni is small, precise, and patient with the kind of slow patience that comes from doing fitted things for impatient people.
"Everybody asks me about social media," she says, before I ask her about social media. "But Instagram doesn't take a measurement. Instagram doesn't tell you when the lining is wrong." She pauses, finds a pin in her cuff, sets it aside. "What changed for me wasn't the photos. It was that customers could finally tell other customers we were good — and that the message was somewhere they would actually look."
"Instagram doesn't take a measurement. Instagram doesn't tell you when the lining is wrong."
Before the listing: the year of word-of-mouth
From 2019 to 2022, Adunni Tailoring House grew the way most small shops in Lagos grow: cousin-by-cousin, wedding-by-wedding. A bridesmaid for one Saturday became a bride for the next. Adunni didn't keep records. "I had a notebook," she says, holding up a real one, "and the notebook had pages I had to rip out when I lost a customer because I forgot a fitting."
By the third year she had two machines, one apprentice, and what she calls "the saturation problem": the same circle of clients, repeating, but never widening.
The first twelve reviews
Adunni's listing went live on a Sunday in November 2022. She sent the link to a WhatsApp group of past clients with a single sentence: "If I sewed for you and you liked it, please leave a few words here."
Twelve people did. The reviews were not glowing in the way reviews online tend to be glowing. They were specific. One mentioned the way Adunni recut a sleeve at 9pm the night before a wedding. One said, plainly, that the price went up between the deposit and the pickup, but that the work was worth it. One reviewer rated her four stars and explained why.
"That four-star review was the best thing that happened to my page," Adunni says. "After that, customers trusted the five-stars."
It is a small but durable lesson: the perfect-rated listing is the one that looks fake. The believable listing is the one that has, somewhere in its history, a customer who was not entirely happy and an owner who answered her in public.
The verified badge, and what it actually does
Six months in, Adunni applied for the Verified program. The check is straightforward: a CAC business name, a BVN-linked owner, two utility bills, and a video walkthrough of the premises. It costs nothing. The badge is a small green ribbon next to the listing name.
She tells me the badge changed how customers wrote to her, more than how many wrote. "Before, people would ask: are you real? Now they ask: when can you fit me?"
The waitlist, and the discipline of saying no
By late 2024, the listing was sending Adunni more inquiries than she could absorb. "I had to learn to say no," she says, "which is the hardest thing for any tailor in Lagos to do." The waitlist began as an apology and became a feature.
The shop now opens its books once a quarter, takes a deposit through the directory's Bookings tool, and closes again. It is not a strategy borrowed from anywhere — it is a strategy that emerged from being small.
- Open books on the 1st of January, April, July, October.
- Take 30% deposit at the time of booking; non-refundable after the first fitting.
- Confirm by WhatsApp within 48 hours; if no reply, re-open the slot.
- Send a "thank you and please review" message six days after pickup. Always six.
What's next, and what isn't
Adunni is not opening a second location. She has, twice in the last year, been offered investment for one. "If I open another shop, the next person who walks through this door will not get me. They will get my idea of me, sewn by someone else."
Instead, she is teaching: two apprentices a year, paid, with the explicit promise that they will leave and start their own. The first one opened her own shop in Yaba in March. She has 31 reviews and a three-month waitlist of her own.
Reporting: Tobi Salami. Photographs: Ifeoma Nnaji. Adunni Tailoring House is a verified listing on ConnectCiti; the listing was not aware of this story until publication.