How the Amazon Innovation Accelerator helped Niyo grow better

There's a point in many businesses where the very instinct that drove early success can start to hold them back. The challenge isn't losing creativity. It's adding enough structure to scale without losing what made the company successful in the first place. 

For Oyin Adebayo, Founder of Niyo Hair and Beauty, innovation was always driven by instinct. She called it a creative squiggle: chasing every idea until it either succeeded or drained the team's energy. The Amazon Innovation Accelerator showed her how to keep creativity while giving it direction. 

Running on a creative squiggle 

Niyo Hair and Beauty is a beauty tech platform built around Birmingham’s first AI-powered hair salon. It forms part Oyin’s wider technology company, Niyo Group. Before the Amazon Innovation Accelerator, creative instinct was what Oyin and her team relied on. 

The way I saw innovation before was like a creative squiggle. Our process was always just running with any idea we had. I never understood there could be framework for it. 

What struck her during the first day of the programme wasn’t new technology. It was a way to formalise a gut feeling she kept having. 

Innovation is in my team’s DNA. I came to the programme wanting to find out how exactly a business can stage innovation, to learn a new way of thinking that would help my team and business to grow.  

Managing risk without losing momentum 

What Oyin took from Amazon’s Working Backwards approach was a set of tools: memos to test an idea before committing to it and checkpoints to catch anything that could put the whole business at risk. 

The programme gave me a structured way to think, in a way that doesn’t stifle creativity while also putting risk management in the middle of it. That’s quite a difficult balance to strike. 

Now, ideas at Niyo start small and cheap instead of big and all-consuming: 

Before, we'd see a big idea right to the end. We’d fail fast but lose all motivation. Now we approach it from a smaller scale, a smaller cost. If it fails, we use it as data for the next idea. That’s the shift that’s happened for me since the programme. 

Unlocking growth from a new way of thinking 

Before Amazon’s Innovation Accelerator, product development took the Niyo team around 18 months. Today, that process has been whittled down to just four weeks. 

Previously, we spent 12-18 months to develop a full version of a product. The programme, along with how technology is advancing, has squashed this to four weeks. Saving time has also saved us money. There’s been a positive correlation from cost to revenue and so we’re making more profit. 

At the same time, Oyin has grown her network of self-employed stylists: 

When we started the programme, we had two local stylists we were working with on a self-employed basis. Today, we’ve had enough demand to scale this to 20 stylists. Their income is more than what the average person makes in the UK, it's something I’m really proud of. 

Extending value beyond Niyo 

Oyin’s own challenge, maintaining creativity while adding just enough structure to scale, is the same one she thinks matters to government and other large employers: 

Programmes like Amazon’s Innovation Accelerator matter for entrepreneurs because it gives businesses a way to think about scaling without letting go of innovation. The level of knowledge I’ve gained from Amazon has accelerated the growth of Niyo.