ISSUE 48/DEC2022 - Flipbook - Page 18
Africa’s Most Influential Women | EVERYDAY HEROES
development stage, which is targeting 100 Million USD
that looks at the broader angle including textile and
apparel manufacturing among other things.
And you also have the incubators
element. How many brands are you
supporting at the moment and how is
that going?
So far we have 14 brands in first cohort of incubators
currently from Ghana and Nigeria. But our vision is
to eventually be in eight African countries, including
Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa.
We’ve done our market research and have identified
that these are the markets where we believe creative
businesses are thriving.
We see a lot of amazing trends coming up, and the
strategy behind the incubators is to capture these ideas
and talents at their very nascent stage to ensure and
help the creatives to do things properly, so that they
can compete on a global level.
Let me bring you back to creatives
themselves more so fashion and
apparel creatives. Over all these years,
do you think Africa’s designers are
getting it right?
I think they’re doing what they can within their own
capacities, with very limited resources available to
them. A lot of them have done amazingly well on their
own without any external support or funding. Their
resilience is unbelievable.
But to move forward, they have to be even more
innovative and create an ecosystem that blends their
culture, but which still, gives them value proposition
which positions them internationally, and survive
globally. But again, to do this properly they need
money, infrastructure and Intellectual Property
protection.
However, there is also that perception
of African fashion being vibrant colours,
print, Ankara or Kente. Nothing wrong
with that, but do you think there’s a need
to ‘liberate’ African fashion from being
culturally emblimised?
I think what we should actually do is the reverse.
Africa is always the trendsetter. Many reports indicate
that by 2050, a quarter of the world’s population will
be African. That puts a lot of power in our hands to set
trends. We don’t need to adapt and adjust to fit it. We
should dictate.
Africa is a leader when it comes to creativity, our
culture and our heritage. But what we haven’t done is
capitalized on it and we haven’t packaged this well, for
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it to be globally accepted. And I think that is what we
should do.
Let me bring you to the topical issue of
Climate Change. The Fashion industry is
reportedly one of the worst contributors
to the crisis. But what’s your take on
fashion and climate change?
We have a huge fashion waste problem in West Africa.
In 2020, I was interviewed by BBC, and was filmed
at one of the landfills, where most of the discarded
second clothes ended up. It is a huge waste and I was
like listen, we have to find a solution to this. So we
have now brought in Fiona Coyne, who used to be the
head of CSR at Vlisco Group, as the head of ESG and
she is spearheading this project.
We have also done a Joint Venture partnership with
Circularity, in which they are going to take the clothes
before they end on the landfill, sort them out by
separating cotton from polyester and recycled the
cotton to make T-shirts and more.
We definitely don’t want to contribute too fastfashion, and what we are creating is a system that is
sustainable, upcycled, great for the environment, great
for us and makes us money. We have a very strong
thought process in this area and every designer on
our incubators must align and have a strong focus on
sustainable fashion.
And how can the fashion designers be
helped to translate their designs as we
see them on the catwalk, to reality? That
is from pricing, sizing, product quality
and also importantly accessibility to
their products.
These are all the things that we include in our
incubators programmes. It is important for all
designers to know about merchandising and how to
put a collection together. But the collection is not the
catwalk. Fashion shows should be used as marketing
tools to attract buyers to their brand. Once a fashion
show is done, the designer must be in a position to go
into a showroom where buyers can be able to make
an order. It is key therefore that designers position
themselves in a way that drives in the buyers and
retail. But they need to be well educated on how to
price adequately for the market so that they are not
overpriced or under-priced. At the end of the day, they
have to make a profit, and its margin depends on how
they price and the quality of the product.
In our programmes, we engage the right people with
the know-how to teach the creators how to do these
things. We also pair them with industry-established
mentors. And then our VC partners bring in the finance
component and we teach them how for example, to ▶