Seventeen years after its founding, Salone Jamboree has stepped beyond the newsroom unveiling “Shop With Stars,” a weekly shopping experience powered by a new partnership with home appliances brand ICONA London, and a promise that every customer deserves to feel like a star.
On 29 May 2009, Mohamed Muntala Kamara walked into the British Council Auditorium in Freetown and launched a website. The idea was simple but bold: give Sierra Leone’s emerging artists and entertainment industry a platform they had never had.
Sixteen years and hundreds of stories later, that website became Salone Jamboree described by its founder as the first Sierra Leonean-owned online newspaper dedicated to arts, culture, entertainment, and tourism. And on Thursday, on the occasion of the platform’s 17th anniversary, Kamara stood before guests and partners to announce its most unexpected chapter yet.
“Seventeen years. We have not just reported the news we’ve created it,” Kamara told the gathering. “We’ve featured almost every artist in this country and empowered them. We told their stories beyond the headlines. We organised events that changed lives.”
Those words carry weight for anyone who has followed Salone Jamboree’s trajectory. The platform has covered Sierra Leone’s cultural heartbeat through an era of dramatic change documenting musicians, filmmakers, chefs, dancers, and storytellers who rarely made it onto mainstream front pages.
But Kamara’s reflection stretched further back than digital columns and press releases. He recalled a 2016 initiative that raised eyebrows at the time: a correctional beauty pageant, staged inside a women’s prison, combining skills training, public speaking, and artwork for incarcerated women.
“We told her: circumstances do not become your crown,” Kamara said. The woman who won that competition, he announced, is now back in school, studying to become a lawyer. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of Salone Jamboree. We don’t just cover culture. We create second chances.”
The anniversary event carried two significant announcements. First, Salone Jamboree is launching an awards ceremony to formally recognise the giants of Sierra Leone’s arts, tourism, and cultural industries musicians, dancers, filmmakers, chefs, and storytellers whose contributions, in Kamara’s words, “mix it and make it beautiful.”
“It is time to put their names in light,” he said.
The second announcement was the launch of “Shop With Stars” a weekly shopping experience developed in partnership with ICONA London, one of Sierra Leone’s fastest-expanding home appliances and electronics brands. The concept, scheduled to run every Friday, will offer customers 15 percent off any product purchased on that day.
“Shopping should not be stressful. It should be relaxed. It should be fun. It should make you feel like a real star,” Kamara said. “Every customer becomes part of the story. We are turning errands into experiences.”
The partnership with ICONA London brings together media and retail in a way that reflects the brand’s accelerating push into Sierra Leone’s consumer market. ICONA London, described as one of Sierra Leone’s leading electrical and electronics appliance companies, opened a new branch on Wilkinson Road in January 2026, expanding its reach along one of Freetown’s busiest commercial corridors. 
The brand has also been building a network of financial partnerships designed to make its products accessible to ordinary households. In February 2026, Ecobank Sierra Leone officially sealed a partnership with ICONA London to expand access to affordable asset financing, enabling households and businesses to purchase essential appliances and electronics through flexible installment payments.  More recently, FirstBank Sierra Leone and ICONA London launched an “Asset Financing Against Personal Salary” scheme, introducing a “Shop Pay Small-Small” model designed to enable salaried account holders to acquire home appliances and electronics through flexible repayment arrangements. 
At the Shop With Stars launch, ICONA London’s Marketing Manager Joshua Kanu expressed gratitude to the guests who attended, noting that ICONA is working to change the narratives around shopping in Sierra Leone. He highlighted the brand’s growing network of partner banks, fintech companies, and other institutions as central to making that shift real.
The 15 percent Friday discount is more than a promotional gimmick, according to Kamara. In a market where the cost of household goods remains a significant barrier for working-class families, the intention is structural bringing quality appliances within reach and making the experience of acquiring them something to look forward to rather than dread.
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“In Sierra Leone, people want good products, but the cost is often too high to pay at once,” ICONA’s representative Kai Pengusaquee has previously noted.  Shop With Stars sits within that same logic: affordability as a principle, not merely a marketing line.
For Salone Jamboree, it represents the latest evolution of a platform that began as a culture website and has since staged prison pageants, broken entertainment stories, and now entered the retail space all under the same founding conviction that ordinary Sierra Leoneans deserve more than they are typically offered.
Seventeen years in, Kamara is not slowing down.
