Customers walking into a pharmacy often know what they want before they reach the counter.

They ask for the painkiller they have used before, the supplement whose packaging they recognise or the medicine their doctor prescribed by a familiar brand name. For pharmacies, that familiarity makes established brands easier to sell.

Isaac Awulu wanted to know what would happen if the pharmacy put its own name on the shelf.

The question emerged during his time as Pharmacy Manager at Mekason Pharmacy in Cross River, where he began examining an area the business had not previously entered: private-label medicines and health products.

Mekason, like many community pharmacies, made its money primarily by purchasing products made by pharmaceutical companies and reselling them to customers. Isaac’s proposal was that the pharmacy should test whether some of that demand could support products carrying Mekason’s own label.

It sounded straightforward. It wasn’t. “The first thing you realise is that putting your name on a product doesn’t give the customer a reason to buy it,” Isaac said. “You’re asking somebody to choose something unfamiliar when there may be a brand beside it that they already know.” That problem would shape much of what followed.

Two unlikely starting points

The pharmacy eventually settled on Vitamin C and metronidazole as the first two products for the experiment.

It was an unusual pairing. One was familiar territory for customers browsing consumer-health products. The other belonged to a very different part of pharmacy practice and, where applicable, remained subject to prescription and professional dispensing requirements.

Isaac says the common thread came from what Mekason could see in its own business. “It wasn’t about finding two products that looked alike,” he said. “We were looking at where demand existed and asking whether there was room for Mekason to participate differently.”

Maureen Madubueze, Mekason’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, remembers being interested in the commercial proposition.

“We had never really looked at ourselves as the owner of a product,” Madubueze said. “Our business was buying and selling other companies’ brands. Isaac brought us a reason to consider doing something different.”

The two products became Mekason’s first private-label test. Then customers got a vote.

The shelf is not the market

The first lesson came quickly: availability and adoption were not the same thing.

Customers who had bought the same brands repeatedly did not suddenly abandon them because a pharmacy alternative appeared nearby. Some were willing to consider another option. Others weren’t. That forced Isaac to look beyond the product itself.

He began paying closer attention to purchasing behaviour and the conversations taking place at the counter. Which customers asked about price? Which arrived committed to a particular brand? Where were customers willing to consider an alternative? What questions did they ask before switching?

Those differences began influencing how the products were presented. “The mistake would have been trying to sell the same way to everybody,” Isaac said. “The customer who is already committed to a brand and the customer asking whether there is another option are telling you two different things.”

For pharmacy staff, that meant learning when the Mekason alternative belonged in the conversation—and when it did not.

Metronidazole added another boundary. Whether the medicine itself was appropriate was a clinical and dispensing matter, not a marketing decision. The commercial question existed only where the customer legitimately had a choice among appropriate available products.

What customers taught the business

As the products spent more time on the shelf, the pharmacy began learning from the response. Some assumptions held. Others did not.

Customer conversations provided clues that sales figures alone could not. Sales, in turn, showed whether those conversations were actually translating into purchases. Isaac wanted both.

“I wasn’t interested in saying the strategy worked because the pharmacy had a good month,” he said. “I wanted to know what customers were doing with these particular products.”

That attention to customer behaviour helped Mekason adjust its approach as the experiment developed. And another feature of private label was becoming difficult for management to ignore: the economics.

A different kind of sale

Selling an established manufacturer’s product gives a community pharmacy the margin attached to the retail transaction. Mekason’s own products worked differently.

As Vitamin C and metronidazole gained customers, the pharmacy was earning significantly stronger margins on those sales.

“The margins got our attention,” Madubueze said. “Once customers were accepting the products, you could see that these were not economically the same as the products we normally resold.”

Mekason recorded an approximately 20 per cent increase in overall revenue during the period encompassing the private-label initiative and other commercial changes at the pharmacy.

The figure tells only part of the story. What interested management was that some of that growth was now coming from a source that had not existed before: Mekason’s own products. For Isaac, that was evidence that the original question was worth asking.

From retailer to brand owner

Private label did not transform Mekason into a pharmaceutical manufacturer, nor did two products suddenly replace the established brands on its shelves. What changed was the range of commercial choices available to the pharmacy.

Mekason had tested what it meant to select a product opportunity, put its own name behind it and then confront the same problem every unfamiliar brand faces: getting a customer to choose it.

Isaac’s role in that experiment placed him on both sides of the pharmacy counter looking at the economics from the business side and customer behaviour from the other.

That may explain why he describes the project less as a product launch than as an exercise in understanding choice. “Private label looked attractive on paper,” Isaac said. “But the customer still decides whether your commercial case is real.”

For Mekason, Vitamin C and metronidazole provided an answer. Not every customer switched. They did not need to.

Enough did for a pharmacy that had spent years selling other companies’ products to begin thinking differently about the value of putting its own name on the shelf.