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For Amira Rasool, fashion has been a lifelong passion.
“I was always the person who had my outfit ready for the first day of school, like two weeks before school,” she says. The South Orange, New Jersey, native started a fashion blog late in high school and took internships at magazines like Marie Claire and Womenswear Daily while attending Rutgers University. She landed a role as a fashion assistant at V magazine in her last semester of college.
That same year, she traveled to South Africa, where she discovered local clothing brands she had never heard of in the United States. When she returned, she realized there was no way she could import them abroad. And “it wasn’t just a South African problem,” she says. It is the problem of the whole of Africa. Many brands did not have the technology, infrastructure or access to American retailers to get their clothes outside of Africa’s borders.
The trip planted the seed of an idea for a company that would make this possible, and Russell eventually founded The Folklore Group. It includes a business-to-business platform that connects global retailers with brands from emerging markets such as Africa, South America, Asia and the Caribbean, a marketplace where consumers can find these brands and a newsroom that writes about them.
“We’re specifically targeting brands that are geographically or racially isolated from connecting with retailers,” she said. Rasool, now 27, has raised $1.7 million in pre-seed investments in July 2021 alone.
Here’s how she built her fashion empire.
‘My mother used to send the products from her place.’
After that first visit to South Africa, Rasool looked for a way back home to found her company. She decided to get a Masters in African Studies at the University of Cape Town and then traveled to Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya to learn about other brands and network with business owners.
Rasol officially launched Folklore in September 2018, a direct-to-consumer brand that sells men’s and women’s apparel and accessories, as well as homeware brands. She also sells goods from black merchants in the diaspora.
Photo from Folklore link.
Presented by Amira Rasool
She had $30,000 to start with: $20,000 she saved from working at V magazine and doing some freelance writing, and $10,000 from her father. She used to run the website herself with the help of interns and “my mother used to ship the products from her place to customers,” she says. “It was very much a community effort.”
Russell lived in Cape Town for her degree, then returned to the States in February 2020, moving first to New Jersey and then to Atlanta. As the company found investors, it was able to expand. Folklore now employs a total of 12 people.
Instead of competing with Nordstrom, they were ‘partnering with them’.
In the year After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Rasool realized that retailers were actively looking for black-owned brands to start stocking and selling.
Folklore didn’t have access to the big retailers and could compete with them for the same customer. But if the company was the connective tissue between brands and big retailers, she said, they could partner with them “instead of competing with Nordstroms and Saks, who are now interested in these brands.”
“She saw that if we could get them to be stocked in more stores in addition to The Folklore, we could make a bigger impact on the brands,” she says.
Photos from Folklore link.
Presented by Amira Rasool
Rasool decided to put her efforts behind building the B2B version of the site and launched Folklore Connection in 2022. The wholesale platform allows brands to wholesale their products to larger retailers.
We know our problems better than anyone else
Moving forward is the goal of progress.
We estimate that we can have thousands of brands from around the world using the platform and hundreds of thousands of retailers. They also want to expand their categories into hygiene and kids, for example, and expand their price points to work for a wider variety of retailers.
When giving advice to other black entrepreneurs, she says, “I would say to look at the issues we have in our community as the problems we face and come up with solutions.”
Ultimately, she says, “We know our stories, we know our problems better than anyone else.”
check out:
How these black women entrepreneurs make money pursuing their passion
Single mother earns $10,000 a month at foreign school: ‘I couldn’t earn as much as a regular teacher’
This Millennial Mom Built a $1 Million Business at 33—Here’s Her Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
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