Nikolaieva Oksana Viacheslavivna, 32 years

My name is Oksana Nikolaieva, and today I am an entrepreneur and co-founder of NOKU, a manufacturing and e-commerce company that grew from scratch into a global brand with customers in 35 countries.

At the start of the full-scale war, I lost my brick-and-mortar business in Irpin. That was when a solution I had developed for my own retail space became a product the global market was missing: ready-made visual communication kits for HoReCa and retail—boards, price tags, and sidewalk signs.

My background in management and marketing, strengthened by hands-on experience, enabled me to move quickly from idea to production, build processes remotely, and scale the company internationally from Warsaw while keeping production in Ukraine.

My professional journey has been shaped by a series of decisions to “be global from day one” and by a sense of responsibility for my team and the quality of our work. I have navigated crises involving production capacity shortages, a lack of skilled workers, and changes to marketplace algorithms. In response, I set up our own production, invested in training less experienced specialists, and shifted our focus toward growing our own website.

My early experience—from working as a cashier to becoming a restaurant manager in a record three months, to leading marketing and selling two retail stores—shaped me into a “Doer”: I see limitations as tasks to solve, not obstacles. I think long-term and systematically: I build teams, standards, and sales channels, combining structure with creativity and boldness. I value CrossFit, photography, and music as much as I value business performance metrics.

My value lies in practical solutions: how to launch production from scratch, how to double in size in a year, and how to adjust strategy to changing conditions. I speak openly about the mistakes of thinking locally, choose to operate on a global scale, and live by the principle: “Light in your thoughts creates light in your life.”

How did you come up with the business idea?

The business idea came from a personal need: the first product was conceived as a solution for my own retail space. We made several attempts to create a changeable menu board with letters made from different materials. The final prototype was at Nova Poshta on the day the full-scale war began, because we were on vacation abroad; we collected it a few months later. Finding ourselves on the other side of the world and having lost our brick-and-mortar business in Irpin, we decided to try selling through an international marketplace the product we had created for ourselves—and immediately realized that the market had no similar ready-made décor solutions for retail: ready-made sets of price tags, boards, sidewalk signs, and so on.

What key skills helped you launch your business?

Management and marketing. I studied them at university and continued to deepen my knowledge after graduating.

What were the 3 most difficult challenges you solved in the early years?

• Setting up production from scratch in a city where you don’t know anyone and generally don’t know your way around.
• Hiring the first team: we hired people on the principle of “let’s just find colleagues as quickly as possible”—which was, of course, a mistake. Later, we had to approach this task more responsibly. 
• Building production processes while being located away from the production site.

What crises has your business faced, and how did you overcome them?

We have faced several different crises.

1. The first was that we couldn’t produce enough to meet our customers’ requests. After that, we decided we needed our own production.
2. The second crisis was related to skilled staff. Our production is in Ukraine, and we decided to hire less-qualified colleagues and train them ourselves.
3. The third crisis came a few months ago, when our main marketplace changed its algorithms. We tackled it by focusing on selling our products through our own website.

Which decisions proved most effective for the company’s growth?

The most important decision was to be a global company from the outset. This mindset opened the door to the global market and gave us the opportunity to work with some of the world’s leading companies in HoReCa and retail.

Which of your mistakes do you now consider your most valuable learning experience?

Opening a business aimed solely at local customers in a residential neighborhood—this concept should be banned unless you plan to work 14 hours a day and earn a 10% profit margin.