Khalia and Courtney Ismain tried a discount card, a marketplace and partner-backed advertising. The planned closure offers a chance to look at what each did for merchants.
Jamii will stop adding new brand and event listings on December 31, 2026, under a closure timetable published by the UK platform. The business that Khalia and Courtney Ismain started in 2016 spent a decade making Black-owned brands easier to find and buy from. Its wind-down puts a practical question in view. Who does the work of getting a small brand in front of a shopper before that person knows to look for it?
Khalia Ismain, who identifies herself as a Black woman founder in an interview with TreasureTress, described the support she found among other Black founders. In the closing letter she and Courtney signed, they describe a frustration with businesses that were easy to miss even when they had something worthwhile to sell. For a shopper, a recommendation might solve that problem for one purchase. For a merchant, the harder job is reaching people repeatedly enough to build a business.
A card, then a place to shop
Jamii’s first answer was a discount membership. A shopper could use the card to get money off at participating Black-owned businesses. The offer gave someone a reason to try a merchant they had just discovered. For participating merchants, any discount they offered could be understood as a cost of acquiring customers. Whether it paid off would depend on what the customer bought and whether they came back. Those economics would differ from one business to the next, and Jamii’s public account does not show them.
The founders say raising investment let them work full-time, hire and build partnerships. Jamii’s own timeline dates its online marketplace to 2020. It describes an assortment ranging from hot sauce to haircare and recalls running pop-up shops in central London. With a discount card, a shopper could discover a brand through Jamii and buy from the merchant. A marketplace brought different sellers into one place, giving shoppers a reason to browse across products and making comparison easier.
A marketplace also has to remain useful to both sides. It needs a reason for shoppers to return and enough suitable businesses willing to keep participating. For a founder who sells there, a spike in orders can be valuable, but it is difficult to tell what remains after the promotion without following those customers over time. Those are questions raised by the design of the platform. They do not tell us what drove Jamii’s decision to close.
Buying visibility for a merchant
Another strand of Jamii’s work addressed businesses that needed reach outside its own shop. In its 2025 Compass announcement, outdoor advertising company Bauer Media Outdoor named Flake Bake, a maker of Caribbean-inspired pastries, among the winners of a programme run with Jamii. Bauer said each selected business would receive a national digital outdoor campaign valued at £50,000. Flake Bake separately acknowledged winning an advertising campaign of that value. Its announcement gave a planned launch period, and these accounts do not verify that the campaign ran or show what it delivered in sales.
The award gives a sense of what a partnership can do that a directory cannot. A directory makes a merchant discoverable to people already browsing. A billboard can introduce a brand to people who are on their way somewhere else. That can be helpful for a business that already knows where people can buy its products and can fulfil additional orders. The ad space and its stated value remain distinct from cash in the company’s account. A merchant assessing an offer like this can ask which locations it covers, what the audience is likely to see and how it will recognise any increase in demand.
Jamii reports generating more than £500,000 in sales in its member notice. The founders’ closing letter uses a broader figure of more than £1 million for sales and growth opportunities. These are Jamii’s accounts of what it generated for the businesses it supported. The two numbers should not be added together or read as the platform’s own revenue. Without a breakdown, they also cannot tell a merchant what a typical listing, promotion or partnership returned.
What members can still use
Jamii says it relaunched its website in June 2025. Its closure notice says new brand and event listings will stop at the end of 2026 and the site will remain active until July 5, 2027. Existing cardholders can see and use their discounts until their own memberships end, under the renewal timetable in the notice. Members should check their own renewal date. The date the site comes down and the date a cardholder loses access need not be the same.
The letter puts the closure in the founders’ own terms. They say they are ready to end this chapter after a decade. The documents do not establish that the company was insolvent or that any one product, investment decision or market shift drove the closure. What they do show is that the Ismains tried several ways to put Black British brands in view, and that those ways served different purposes.
For a merchant that used Jamii, one practical step is to trace where new customers first heard of the business, which ones later bought directly and whether they can find the brand again after the listings stop changing. For a group building the next directory or marketplace, that same test can guide what it builds first. Pick one job, whether it is getting a merchant discovered, getting a shopper through checkout or getting someone to return. Agree with merchants on how to measure it. The worth of making a business easier to find shows up in what the customer can do next.
