Aset, Cameroonian Beauty Goes Online
Published on July 3, 2026
Yaoundé is home to hundreds of hair salons, estheticians, wellness coaches, and paramedical practitioners. Most do not have a website. Many do not have a booking system. Some don’t even have a physical storefront visible from the street. For a customer who doesn’t know the right person to contact, finding a reliable service provider often comes down to trusting a WhatsApp number shared by a friend. It is in this dense, informal market that Rosalie Mandeng decided to build ASET.
The idea didn’t come from market research. It stemmed from personal frustration. Rosalie sells hair extensions under her own brand, Nappy Me, and is constantly on the lookout for hairdressers who can work with her products. Finding the right person, with the right technical skills and available at the right time takes her a disproportionate amount of time every single time. The sector is growing rapidly, and the skills are out there, but there’s no effective way of locating them.
ASET, launched in 2024, aims to fill this gap. The platform lists service providers in seven categories: beauty and aesthetics, wellbeing and relaxation, coaching, fashion and image, paramedical services, events and retail. Professionals are vetted before being listed. An integrated skin and hair assessment guides users towards the service providers best suited to their profile. Bookings can be made directly via the app.
The initial target audience is indicative of the choices made by the founder: tourists, expats and passing travellers. These are people without a local network, who need a trustworthy place to stay quickly and don’t have time to waste. It is a narrower segment than the general public in Yaoundé, but one that is easier to win over and more likely to generate verifiable reviews. It is a way of building the platform’s reputation before expanding.
On the service-provider side, ASET also offers visibility tools and marketing campaigns. This is where the model becomes more complex to assess: convincing professionals accustomed to word-of-mouth to pay for a digital presence takes time and education. Rosalie Mandeng is well aware of this. Her own journey – from a detox drink brand she had to abandon due to a lack of support to a hair extension business she ran alongside her studies – taught her the cost of not having a proper structure in place. “The main challenge was the lack of support. I was very much on my own” she says. This is precisely what she is trying to spare her service providers from.
The announced targets are ambitious: 600 active, paying service providers by 2027, 1,500 in the medium term, followed by expansion into the CEMAC region. These figures assume rapid uptake in a market where the digitalisation of the self-employed is still progressing slowly. The real question is not whether there is a need, there clearly is; but how quickly professionals in the sector are prepared to change their habits.
ASET’s approach is, at its core, less about technology and more about people. The platform does not solve an algorithmic problem; rather, it seeks to reorganise a market that has always operated on the basis of interpersonal trust. Transforming this into digital trust that is verifiable and scalable is the real work that remains to be done.
ASET is incubated by Enovation Factory, Hodi’s partner incubator in Cameroon.
ASET is one of the start-ups supported by Hodipulse_, the online presence programme dedicated to African start-ups in the seed stage._
Discover ASET
