Understanding Branding – How Education Made Me Interview With Bolutife Awakan

Please tell us a little about yourself and your background.

Well there is going to be a lot of me…Lol, as I’ve never been shy to put myself out there. So, my name is Bolutife Awakan and I hail from Abeokuta in Ogun State. Growing up, my sibling and I were brought up by my mum alone. Fairly early in my life, I realized how much this woman was willing to do and sacrifice just to give us a decent life – to eat well, to attend good schools and so on. I also observed that she was very optimistic that we were going to turn out great. See me now, right? And this woman, she rebuked me a lot! I mean, there was no room for behaving anyhow. So to be honest, I didn’t used to like her, because I was like, cut me some slack! But now I’m grateful for a lot of those principles that she instilled in me. Then later, we had a fire incident that raised the entire house down. We lost the little we had. We lost everything. I couldn’t even take anything out, just the clothes I was wearing. At the time, I was working as a sales rep in Idumota in Lagos Island, just after my secondary school. And I just received that call on my way home. It was only my brother that was at home so he couldn’t even carry anything out when he saw the fire start. So we just carried ourselves like that and found relatives to stay with. Eventually, we ended up with our foster family who are just amazing people. People couldn’t even tell us apart because we did everything together, so it was a perfect match for us. And the way God works is incredible because the flow of the discipline and principles that my mum instilled in us was evident, and then coupled with the father figure, everything just balanced out. It was smooth. However, I had a lot of challenges as well at the beginning. Like with trying to fit in. I would misbehave and they would put me in my place. But everything is great now. When I tell people I have five siblings, they will comment that I have such a big family. There is no separating us and this is what I call family. At some point, I went to Yaba College of Technology and I felt God orchestrated that too as I never wanted to go to the University of Lagos. I can tell you that I ascribe a lot of success to going to Yaba Tech. I found design from there, branding from there, a lot of my confidence was built while at that school, because you had to do a lot of practicals and presentations. So there are a lot of things that help me now that I learned from there, such as public speaking, putting documentation together and writing reports. There are a lot of things that I learned there. Though all these things I learned were in the sciences, it was easy to just adapt them to what I do now. At one point, I even went to a low cadre private school in Ikorodu but couldn’t afford the fees after some time. So I just told my mum, let me come back to Yaba. She was still staying in Ikorodu so I had to move in with another foster family. I was just moving around, trying to find a fill-in, somewhere I could call home and find comfort in. Somewhere I knew I could thrive.