Over the past eight months, Heroshe, a once-trusted air and freight logistics startup, has become a nightmare without an end for many Nigerians.
Individuals and businesses that ordered goods and services via the shipping service from China, the US, and the UK say that they have been unable to get their packages for months, with little to no communication from Heroshe.
“I was sending them messages on Instagram almost every day, and they kept telling me, ‘We have backlogs.’ To the extent that those people who paid for pre-order started disturbing me, looking for me everywhere, threatening my family, and using the police to look for me,” Dan*, a gadget retailer in Lagos, tells Techpoint Africa.
I had to close my shop and was on the run for doing nothing wrong. During that period, my grandfather was sick in Benin, and I could not even go and see him till he died,” he adds.
After coming across Heroshe on Instagram, Dan* decided to use the courier service to order gadgets from the US in September 2024. The promised shipping period of seven to ten days mysteriously became 20 days. But this did not raise any red flags for him. After all, it was only a ten-day difference.
In November 2024, he put all his money together and got more from customers who wanted to pre-order the new iPhone 16 series, promising delivery in 20 days. But it’s been over six months now, and there is no sign of his package.
Heroshe was founded in 2019 by Osinachi and Chichi Ukomadu. The couple set out to connect African shoppers in Nigeria with goods in the US, the UK, and China. Over these years, Heroshe was a trusted shipping platform for individuals and businesses across Nigeria. But everything began to go south in 2024.
A former Heroshe employee who spoke to Techpoint Africa on the condition of anonymity said the issues began when the company moved its US warehouse from Texas to Delaware. The plan was initially to open a Delaware warehouse to offer priority customers a faster and easier method of shipping their goods, while every other customer continued to ship to the Texas warehouse.
“But along the line, the management thought it was best to cancel all operations in Texas within three weeks. We had been in Texas for the past 11 years, but in three weeks, they cancelled all shipments to Texas and told customers to start shipping their items to Delaware, and fired everybody in the Houston warehouse,” the former employee said.
Meanwhile, Techpoint Africa learnt that the employees hired in the Delaware warehouse were not professionals. They were also not equipped to deal with the large influx of packages coming into the warehouse. Moreover, there was no manager to supervise the staff’s work.
“By the time we figured out that the people in Delaware weren’t properly onboarded and were not doing well, there was already a huge backlog. We were discovering in November how bad the backlog from August was. There was a conversation about telling customers what was happening, but the CEO (Osi) said that would make them panic.”
Instead of telling customers that the reason for the delay was an operational issue on its end, several sources who spoke to Techpoint Africa said Heroshe informed customers that there was a delay from its shipping partners due to a rush during the festive season. The company promised customers they would get their packages no later than February 2025.
“Earlier this year, we discovered that we actually did not ship out those items; they were in the warehouse, even though customers were promised heaven and earth. It got to a point where employees were being attacked on their social media platforms. A number of us had to remove our personal details from the Internet,” the former employee further revealed.
Even though Heroshe raised an undisclosed amount in 2022, it could not ship the packages customers had paid for due to a lack of funds. After several complaints, Heroshe informed customers that they did not have the money to ship their items; however, if they were willing to pay another clearance fee, their items would be shipped.
Customers who were unwilling to pay extra clearance fees have still been unable to get their packages.
Lucky, a customer who ordered items to the Heroshe US and China warehouses in September 2024, said that the items ordered to the US warehouse came in April 2025, while the China items have yet to arrive, without any concrete reasons from the logistics company.
“They [Heroshe] added me to their forum on WhatsApp, and there, I realised that I wasn’t the only one who had a problem, and I saw the gravity of the situation. They had a town hall in October; the CEO and Adeola, their admin head, were present. They allowed people to speak, and I saw my problem was small; there were people with goods worth hundreds of millions.”
Lucky adds that despite asking about his goods from the US and China, Heroshe addressed the delay from the US but did not comment on the goods from China.
“It was around March that they posted on the forum that they had money issues. They said that, even though the pallets had arrived in Nigeria, they didn’t have the money to clear them and asked if we were willing to pay extra. Initially, I had paid ₦278,000 for eight items from the US, and I had to pay ₦160,000 extra to get them,” Lucky added.
On a visit to the Heroshe office on Airport Road in Ikeja, Lagos, Techpoint Africa found a couple of disgruntled customers who claimed that they had had to go to the police station to defend themselves against customers whose packages they couldn’t deliver due to the problems at Heroshe.
Amid complaints from customers on its WhatsApp community and via its website chat function, Heroshe deactivated the chat function on the site and WhatsApp, leaving customers who had already complained about their inability to contact them via phone or email in the dark.
Sources close to the matter told Techpoint Africa that Heroshe plans to shut down its current operations and pivot from logistics to a software business.
As of press time, Heroshe had not responded to Techpoint Africa‘s request for comment. However, in an email blast to customers, the company said, “We want to be clear, we’re not going anywhere until every single package has been delivered. You have our word.”
*— Not real name
