Leddar — A managed B2B marketplace for Nigeria's leather industry

Nigeria's leather manufacturing industry had no trusted digital infrastructure connecting fashion brands who needed quality leather goods with the skilled artisans who could produce them — leaving brands relying on informal networks and artisans struggling for consistent, fairly paid work.

Alfred Jarikre came to Yielded Circle Tech with a clear vision and a complex problem. Nigeria has a significant population of skilled leather artisans — craftspeople with the ability to produce high-quality goods for the fashion industry. It also has fashion brands actively looking for reliable production partners. But the two sides of this market had no trusted way to find each other, verify each other, or transact with each other safely.

The risks on both sides were real. Brands had no way to verify an artisan's skills, legitimacy, or track record before placing an order. Artisans had no protection against brands who might place orders and then fail to pay. And without a central system managing orders, pricing, and communication, every transaction was a new exercise in building trust from scratch.

The instinct might have been to build a marketplace where brands browse artisan profiles and contact them directly — but that model would have replicated the same trust problem digitally. Any artisan could list themselves. Any brand could reach out. And disputes would have no neutral ground.

The client's brief called for something more controlled: a managed marketplace where an administrator mediates every match, verifies every artisan, and holds every payment in escrow until work is confirmed complete.

We designed and built Leddar as a managed marketplace — meaning no brand contacts an artisan directly and no artisan receives payment directly from a brand. Every interaction flows through an admin layer that controls matching, pricing, and payouts. This was the core architectural decision that shaped everything else.

Brand Portal: Fashion brands register, submit orders, browse curated artisan matches proposed by the admin, and make payments into escrow. They have visibility into order status and communicate with the platform — not directly with artisans.

Artisan Dashboard: Leather artisans register and go through a KYC verification process via VerifyMe.ng before becoming active on the platform. Once verified, they receive order assignments, track production milestones, and receive staged escrow payouts as work is confirmed complete.

Admin Panel: The platform operator has complete visibility and control. They manage artisan verification, match brands with artisans, set commission rates, oversee escrow, manage disputes, and control all platform operations from a single dashboard.

Payment infrastructure: We integrated Paystack for all payment processing — including the Transfers API for managing escrow payouts to artisans in two stages: a milestone payment on order confirmation and a final payment on delivery and brand approval.

Notifications: Rather than building a separate in-app notification system, we integrated the Meta WhatsApp Cloud API as the primary communication channel. Both brands and artisans receive order updates, payment notifications, and status changes via WhatsApp — the channel they already use and trust.

The Leddar engagement involved not just technical delivery but full project scoping, contract negotiation, and milestone planning — the complete agency relationship from brief to build.

Discovery and scoping: We ran a full product scoping session with the client to define the MVP feature set, the user flows for each portal, the order state machine, and the escrow logic. Every major decision — managed vs direct marketplace, RBAC structure, WhatsApp as notification layer — was made in this phase.

Contract and commercial structure: We negotiated and executed a Software Development Agreement covering the project scope, milestone-based payment structure, IP ownership, and support terms. The agreement included a fixed upfront payment before work commenced and subsequent payments tied to milestone delivery.

Client-facing vs internal plan: We maintained a 5-month client-facing milestone plan for project tracking and a tighter internal delivery plan to stay ahead of schedule — ensuring we had buffer for QA, revisions, and client feedback cycles.

Build: We built on a modern, scalable stack: React and Next.js for the frontend portals, Node.js and Express for the backend API layer, PostgreSQL with Prisma for the database, and Cloudplexo-managed AWS infrastructure alongside Vercel for deployment.

The natural instinct when building a marketplace is to make it as open as possible — let buyers browse, let sellers list, let the market find equilibrium. For Leddar, that instinct was wrong.

The managed model — where admin mediates every match — was harder to build, added more complexity to the admin panel, and required more careful state management across the order lifecycle. But it was the right model for this market, at this stage, with these users. It created trust on both sides where no trust infrastructure previously existed.

The lesson is not that managed marketplaces are always better. It is that the marketplace model should follow the trust dynamics of the specific market — not the template of marketplaces you have seen before.