Introduction
A joke about a plantain-infused rum reached a quarter of a million people in 24 hours. When Tola Alade admitted it was an April Fool's prank, it went viral again, this time to 650,000 people. He could have laughed it off. Instead, he decided there was something real underneath the joke, and built it with £600 after being quoted six figures to do it properly. That instinct, to trust conviction over consensus, runs through everything Tola Alade has built.
Why "entrepreneur" is a word he struggles with
Tola describes himself these days as a creative entrepreneur, but admits he has never been fully comfortable with the second half of that title. His discomfort isn't with the work itself, it's with what the word has come to signal: people introducing themselves as entrepreneurs with a glee that doesn't match the grind underneath, and a wider culture that has hollowed the word out the way it once did with "influencer." His guiding words instead, for the last five years, have been faith and focus: faith in the literal and religious sense, and focus as the daily discipline of saying yes to one thing while letting other good ideas fall away.
Boarding school and a new country: building independence the hard way
Tola spent the majority of his early years in Nigerian boarding schools, starting at a tough government school in Ogun State between the ages of 10 and 12, an experience he now credits with forming much of who he became. At a second, private boarding school, he became the dining hall prefect for three consecutive years, from SS1 to SS3, a coveted but relentless position that meant managing seniors, peers and juniors, liaising with cooks, and keeping the peace over food, one of the most common causes of conflict in that environment. He moved to the UK straight after his final exams, a date his mother planned precisely so he wouldn't lose a single extra day at home. He hated the move at first, and admits it took roughly ten years, of the twenty he has now spent in the UK, before he genuinely felt it was home rather than somewhere he was functioning while waiting to leave.
The secret pivot from architecture to design
Tola had always been artistic, drawing and building comic books long before he owned a computer, but his mother steered him toward studying architecture with the logic that if he could draw, he could draw buildings. He carried that plan through university without telling her he intended to pivot into design, only raising it around graduation. His mother was angry and disappointed, he says, but graceful in how she handled it, and later came to see it as the right call. Tola's creative streak had already surfaced elsewhere too: he directed his church choir and built a self-headlined concert called "He Lives" without a guest act, training singers, running early morning leafleting rounds, and packing the venue on his own conviction that a small congregation could still do something big.
What his mother taught him about resilience, speed and frugality
Tola names his mother as the clearest model for the way he now works: relentless to the point that people simply had to get on board, fast enough to move from a Saturday conversation about a catering idea to having a client and a basic logo within a week, and frugal enough to make five pounds feel like fifty. He traces his own instinct to move quickly on ideas, and to make things happen on limited budgets regardless of how uncertain they feel, directly back to watching her operate.
Freelance flyers to burnout: the first business, 2008 to 2017
Tola's first paid design work came almost by accident in 2008, when a church paid him £30 for design work he had done for free. Between 2008 and 2010 he freelanced on club flyers and event posters before rebranding into a more corporate branding business in 2010, a business he ran for seven years. By 2017, two years into fatherhood and running a team of five employees who were all older than him, he had lost his joy in the work. Design, which he genuinely loved, had become transactional through years of commercial repetition, and he describes feeling like he'd spent seven years just plainly growing up. He shut the business down and took a job as a senior designer at a media company, where he was promoted to head of design within eight months.
Living from the inside out: finding Marmalade Collective
A first trip back to Nigeria since 2004, taken while he was working at the media company, planted a belief he couldn't yet articulate or shake, which became Marmalade Collective in 2019. Central to that shift was what Tola calls living from the inside out: building identity from his own values rather than shaping himself to fit whichever room he was in, a habit he traces to his early years in the UK trying to figure out whether to act Nigerian, white British or Caribbean depending on who was around him. He describes the change as costly in the short term, losing acquaintances who weren't real friends, but says it gave him the boldness to function in spaces people told him he shouldn't. That same conviction now sits behind Marmalade's mission, positioned at the intersection of African culture and the mainstream, and behind his coaching of founders on identity as a leadership issue, arguing that leaders who haven't done that work bring their unhappiness into their teams through micromanagement, poor feedback and toxic environments.
From April Fool's joke to a real rum brand
Tola built the concept for Dodo, a plantain-infused rum, as an April Fool's demonstration of what Marmalade does: blending something familiar from African culture with something from mainstream culture. The joke reached roughly 250,000 people within 24 hours, then 650,000 when he revealed it was a prank. Industry veterans told him a minimum production run would be 4,000 bottles and take six to nine months of recipe development at significant cost; he'd told the public he wanted to make 200. Rather than accept the standard answer, he kept asking what it would take if the usual process didn't apply, found partners willing to work at that scale, and had a product within six months, though the first batch, by his own account, tasted horrific. Preorders sold out within a month of launching in September, and by October Tola made a deliberate decision to stop treating Dodo as a joke and start treating it as a real opportunity, moving into scaled production, retail conversations and investor talks.
Leadership as self-leadership first
Asked how he defines leadership, Tola points to a quarterly practice with a tight group of friends called Alpha Resets, multi-day dry fasts designed to bring people back into tune with themselves. The mantra behind it, and Tola's own definition, is that you have to be able to lead yourself before you can lead anyone else, whether that's in marriage, parenting or a company. He ties that self-leadership directly to clarity of core values, arguing that most companies list far too many values to genuinely live by and that three to five, held to consistently, are what actually distinguish one leader from another.
