There was a time when the most important piece of equipment in Tosin Obembe‘s business could fit comfortably in his hands. In 2010, when he began what would eventually become Luova Group, the business was built around production: a camera, a laptop, a growing understanding of the craft and the conviction that there was a business to be built from it. Fifteen years later, the camera remains part of the story, but the business around it looks almost nothing like the one Obembe started.
That distance is what makes Luova Group’s 15th anniversary worth examining. It is not simply the story of a creative company that survived long enough to celebrate another milestone. It is a story about what happens when a business grows up in an industry that keeps changing underneath it, and what a founder must become when the skills that helped start a company are no longer enough to run the company it has become.
When Obembe started TOBEMS Production in November 2010, Nigeria’s creative economy was operating in a very different environment. Instagram had only recently launched, the creator economy had not yet become a major commercial force, and brands still largely treated production, advertising, events and communications as separate disciplines. A production company could concentrate on making productions and leave the rest to other specialists.
The market, however, did not remain that simple. As digital platforms reshaped how Nigerians consumed information and entertainment, brands began demanding more from their creative partners. They needed content that could move between television and social media, campaigns that could generate conversation, experiences that could become content themselves, and people who understood not only how to produce something but why an audience would care about it.
Luova‘s evolution happened against that backdrop. What began as a production company gradually expanded into a broader creative and communications business, eventually becoming a group that brought together Tobems Production, Trois Sitini and Tash Studios, with capabilities spanning production, marketing communications, growth marketing, talent and influencer management. The expansion was not simply a matter of adding new businesses to an organisational chart; it reflected the changing nature of the work itself and the growing realisation that creativity was becoming increasingly difficult to separate into neat categories.
The business had to keep becoming something else
That process of reinvention has been central to Obembe‘s own career. The founder who started out close to the production process eventually had to learn how to build teams, manage clients, develop new business lines and make decisions that affected an organisation rather than an individual project. It is one of the less visible transitions in entrepreneurship: being good at the thing you sell and then having to learn how to build a company around people who can do that thing without you being in every room.
By the time TOBEMS marked its 10th anniversary in 2021, that transition was already well underway. The unveiling of Luova Group as a holding company reflected how far the business had moved from its original production focus and created a structure for its growing interests in marketing communications and related creative services. Obembe had effectively moved from building a production outfit to building an ecosystem around creativity.
The scale of the work changed with it. Over the years, Luova has worked across commercial campaigns, entertainment properties and large-scale productions involving brands and platforms such as TECNO, Nigerian Idol and Big Brother Naija. The company was also involved in the production of Hilda Baci‘s record-setting cook-a-thon, a project that demonstrated the increasing complexity of documenting cultural moments that unfold simultaneously across physical and digital spaces.
Projects like these say something about how much the creative business has changed. A major production is no longer simply about what happens in front of the camera; it is also about what happens around it. The audience may be watching from a television screen, following updates on X, consuming clips on Instagram or discovering the story through a creator several hours later. The work has to survive across all those environments, and the companies producing it have had to develop the capacity to think beyond the original brief.
Obembe has spoken about this shift in the past, particularly the need for creatives to understand their audiences more closely and pay attention to engagement rather than treating reach or impressions as the only measure of success. It is an interesting perspective given where his own career began. The camera may produce the image, but increasingly, understanding the audience determines whether that image has any staying power.
The years that don’t make the anniversary brochure
There is, inevitably, a polished version of a 15-year story. It contains the major clients, the recognitions, the landmark productions and the photographs from anniversary celebrations. The less polished version contains the parts that are usually harder to package: financial pressures, finding and retaining talent, difficult decisions and periods when the future of the business was less certain than the anniversary photograph might suggest.
Luova has had its share of those periods. The company navigated the economic pressures that have affected Nigeria’s creative sector, alongside the challenge of building and retaining the right team, and then faced the disruption of COVID-19, which was particularly severe for an industry dependent on productions, events and physical experiences. Yet the business emerged from that period and continued to expand.
That history gives the 15-year milestone a little more weight. Longevity in a creative business cannot be sustained by good ideas alone. It requires the less glamorous infrastructure of a functioning company: people who stay, systems that improve, clients who return, leadership that can make difficult decisions and the willingness to abandon an approach that has stopped working.
For Obembe, that has meant building something that is increasingly larger than his own creative identity. The camera with which the story began could only ever belong to one person. The organisation that exists today has to belong to many.
From founder to institution builder
This may be the most significant part of Obembe‘s journey, because it changes the question from what he can create to what he can build. A founder who remains the centre of every decision can keep a small company moving, but a group with multiple businesses, teams and ambitions requires a different form of leadership. It requires delegation, structure, succession of ideas and enough trust in other people to allow them to shape the business.
The people around Luova have therefore become an important part of the 15-year story. At its anniversary celebrations, the company recognised members of its team and reflected on the people who had remained through some of its most difficult periods. Obembe has also spoken about the organisation as a family of believers, an acknowledgement that the business could not have reached this point through the founder’s efforts alone.
There is a broader lesson here for Nigeria’s creative economy. The sector has produced plenty of talented individuals, but the next stage of its development will depend on whether more of those individuals can turn their talent into institutions that outlive individual projects. The difference between a creative practitioner and a creative business leader is ultimately the ability to build something that continues to create value when the founder is not the person holding the camera, writing the concept or directing the shoot.
What comes after 15?
The timing of Luova‘s anniversary is significant because Nigeria’s creative economy itself is entering a different phase. Nigerian music, film, fashion, digital creators and entertainment properties have demonstrated the global appetite for African stories, while brands are increasingly looking for partners who understand both commercial objectives and cultural relevance. For companies operating in this space, the opportunity is considerably larger than it was when Obembe started in 2010.
It also means the competition is different. The next generation of creative businesses will not only compete on production quality or creative ideas; they will compete on intellectual property, technology, talent, data, commercial sophistication and their ability to take African creative expertise into international markets. Luova‘s stated plans for larger projects, stronger partnerships and expansion beyond Nigeria suggest that the company sees that opportunity and intends to pursue it.
Obembe‘s own recognition among Nigeria’s 40 Under 40 honourees in 2025 provides another marker of that trajectory, but awards are ultimately only one way of measuring a business journey. The more revealing measure is the distance between the entrepreneur who started with a production company in 2010 and the business leader now thinking about how to build a creative group capable of competing beyond its original market.
Fifteen years, then, is less a conclusion for Luova than a useful point at which to take stock. The company has moved from production into communications, from a single business into a group and from a founder-led operation into an organisation with ambitions of its own. The industry that shaped its first decade has changed, and the company has changed with it.
For Obembe, perhaps that is the clearest measure of what the past 15 years have produced. He did not simply build a business around a skill he possessed; he kept rebuilding the business as the value of that skill changed.
Sponsored Content
The post Fifteen Years of Reinvention: How Tosin Obembe Built Luova Group Into a Creative Business appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.