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When you visit a fancy shopping district—the Meatpacking District in New York or the Champs Élysée in Paris—you’ll find today’s most famous luxury brands, from Chanel to Tory Burch. Most of them are founded by white designers, with a distinct western perspective.
Amira Rasool thinks this is a problem; She is on a mission to help African designers take their place among their American and European counterparts. Four years ago, she opened The Folklore, a marketplace that explores the best African designers like Ahluwalia or Thebe Magugu. But now the company is expanding beyond selling a single item, and will soon launch a new platform called The Folklore Connection that will make it easier for retailers to get their clothes from these designers in front of new customers.
Rasool grew up loving fashion and once aspired to become a fashion journalist. But while attending Rutgers University, she became interested in African Studies and went on to pursue a Masters in the field at the University of Cape Town. Over time, it occurred to her that she could bring her two passions together. “I studied famous people like James Baldwin and Webb DuBois who dedicated their life’s work to the social and economic future of black people,” she says. I saw an opportunity to highlight the voice and status of black people by helping African designers promote products exported from the continent.
She began exploring emerging fashion industries across Africa, identifying new labels such as Orange Culture and Andrea Iyama from Nigeria and South Africa’s Gozdawa House. She took a 30% commission and brought them to The Folklore Marketplace, which allowed customers in the US and Europe to buy these brands. But she quickly learned that driving enough traffic to the site to make a big impact on behalf of these designers was difficult. To reach a larger audience, she needs to connect with major retailers that carry their collections—from Nordstrom to cool boutiques. “They already had large, established customer bases,” Rasol says.
But this turned out to be a complex endeavor. For one thing, the business infrastructure in Africa can often be challenging to navigate. Global payment systems like Stripe don’t work in many African countries, so designers can’t receive money in their local bank accounts. Then there are problems with shipping. With DHL and FedEx operating across the continent, shipping packages overseas can be prohibitively expensive for individual designers. Even in the US, brands and retailers get much better prices by shipping large quantities of goods.
Rasool spent two years building The Folklore Connect, which provides all the business services African designers need to work with US and European retailers. Designers and brands can apply to be part of the communication. If you choose, you can get a variety of equipment, including a shipping method that allows you to get discounts of up to 80%. Rasol said her team is selective about what brands they bring in. They focus on designers who have a strong vision and create high quality products. Some of the brands he carries, such as Tebe Magugu and Adebayo Oke-Lawle, are very famous in Africa and are very popular in the world. But at Konek, she hopes to bring in lesser-known, up-and-coming designers.” We started with designers from Africa and the diaspora, but most of the infrastructure problems are in other parts of the world, like South America. and Southeast Asia,” Rasol says. “So now we’re opening up our platform to designers from these regions.”
In some ways, Russell is trying to create the kind of luxury we’ve seen in Europe and America. Clothes. Some luxury brands have become more powerful through consolidation. For example, Louis Vuitton Moit Hennessy (LMMH) owns 75 luxury brands, including Christian Dior and Givenchy. Kering owns Gucci, Balenciaga and 13 other brands. This allowed them to invest in building new factories and acquiring prime real estate. Folklor is far from achieving the scale of LVMH and Rasool is not interested in buying any of these companies. Still, Rasool believes there is a lesson to be learned from the big fashion corporations: There is power in bringing luxury brands together and sharing resources and logistics.
While Rasool feels committed to helping African designers grow and bring wealth to their communities, she feels the fashion world misses them when brands have a European-centric perspective. Many African designers incorporate traditional patterns, color palettes and techniques into their work, creating a different aesthetic than Western brands. There’s a lot of beauty that American and European consumers don’t currently have access to. “These designers are combining their heritage and aspects of their environment with their work,” she says. Much of it is new and novel to the West.
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