Redefining "Made in Africa"

0:04Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, May 16th. Africa is experiencing an exciting shift creatively and commercially with growing global attention on its rapidly expanding middle-class population. Yet local fashion entrepreneurs must navigate unique operational challenges and misconceptions about the quality and reputation of made in Africa. Pink Mango's Maris Bonimutwa entered apparel manufacturing in Rwanda to address both economic and social sustainability. Africa is here to offer the social sustainability to make sure that now when we talk about environmental sustainability and social sustainability, they are aligned.

0:54Laduma Ndokolo, founder of the South African luxury knitwear brand Maxoza Africa, drew inspiration from his culture's traditional designs. How do we take local traditional aesthetic and modernize them, but yet at the same time address the big problem that we have in South Africa, slash Africa, of unemployment? And also considering environmental consciousness. And to celebrate African creativity, Renee Falawio founded the concept store Alara in Nigeria. I started Alara in the front of my very emotional place. I wanted to celebrate African creators both on the continent and in the diaspora. I wanted to elevate their work because I hadn't seen it done anywhere else.

1:46This week on the BOF podcast, Maurice, Ladouma and Rennie, together with Roseanne Ahmed, discuss Africa's unique contributions to fashion, their opportunities in sustainable manufacturing and how they are redefining what Made in Africa really means. Here's Maurice Bonimutwa, Laduma Nocolo, and Renée Falawio on the BOF podcast.

2:13I have to say, it is so refreshing as someone who's worked so hard to shape and champion CCI, not only in the Middle East, but of course, in my mother continent, Africa. It is truly refreshing and truly an honor to have such a Pan-African stage of excellence from all corners of the continent. It really is a moment for me, and I am so happy you're all here. Thank you. Let's kick off with what is made. As we all know, manufacturing in Africa comes with a special set of post-colonial obstacles. And yet, of course, despite it all, an immense potential. Maurice from your innovative experience at Pink Mango what are some of the biggest challenges you've come across and what opportunities do you feel local production creates as a designer yourself as well thank you very much Rosanne thank you Imran for having us here and having Africa represented in this type of events and especially in crossroads it's amazing things are moving in the right direction.

3:28So a quick background maybe to respond to your answer. For me, I'm in manufacturing accidentally. My goal was a brand which I started, but I want it to be made in Africa. But very importantly also to leverage on the potential of Africa in the upper role manufacturing and also to respond to the development needs the continent has between job creation, export, you name it. And Africa has been announced as the next frontier for apparel sourcing. So six years ago, I set up Pink Mango in a joint venture initially to respond to new diversification. And actually today, it's never been a better place than to actually also talk about the potential with the tariffs in the US.

4:20We dreamt it. Trump did it. So Africa, while everybody is looking, we're next to diversify. I wanted to tell potential investors, brands here, that please consider Africa as the next destination. Things are moving and are moving fast. We've already big retailers starting trial order in East Africa, West Africa coming as well. Particularly with the Middle East as a neighbor. With the Middle East, yes. And when I say accidentally, initially when I started the joint factory, it was with a former Chinese supplier of mine. But when I once emerged in manufacturing myself, I realized actually what it meant, really cost per minute.

5:07And, oh, actually, when we have to sell to this big retail in Spain, this outerwear, we specialize in padded jackets and outerwear at this price. this is what it means. Oh, workers will come at this hour and leave at 11. We've got 80 % of women, 95 % are youth as well. And all of a sudden, I realized that after 25 years of being a trader, because I've got a trading company in Belgium purchasing for global brands, and I've always contented myself with a BSCI, a CEDEX, a RAP, you name it, but I've never really been into the factory. Yes, I've been in audits and stuff, but once you leave, you don't know what's happening.

5:49And here I had experts of the industry teaching me actually what it is. And for me, there was definitely something to change. And when we talk about sustainability, lots of efforts are being made into environmental sustainability. But when it comes to social sustainability, the norms have not evolved so much. So for me, Africa, then what we had to do is to make sure that it's a canvas, it's an empty template. We are sustainable by nature, the fact that we've not industrialized yet. So how can we, what is going to be our contribution to this sustainability pact? And Africa is here to offer the social sustainability to make sure that now when we talk about environmental sustainability and social sustainability, they are aligned.

6:39And this is really the innovation that Africa can bring. And it's the last frontier because it's the last continent where labor, the workforce is abundant. Labor is still lower cost compared. So if we don't do it now, as it was said yesterday, and if we, the fashion industry, don't do it, nobody else will do it. And this is what we can do in Africa. Absolutely. I always say there's a lot to learn from Africa when it comes to sustainability because of just a natural means of operating. And the world can learn a lot from the continent when it comes to that. Absolutely. Speaking of learning from the continent, Rennie, I have personally witnessed Alara become one of the most celebrated boutiques across Africa.

7:22A concept store that encapsulates lifestyle, good food, art and design long before most even understood what it means to be experiential. what drives your brand selection and considering your own means of shaping shopping how do you see the role of independent retail evolving in nigeria and across the continent in general despite the fact that you clearly have influenced the rest of the world already thank you for that thank you rozan and thank you imran for inviting me to this platform i'm really happy to be here i mean i'll give you a little bit of a background and um i started alara in the front of my very emotional place.

8:06I wanted to celebrate African creators both on the continent and in the diaspora. I wanted to elevate their work because I hadn't seen it done anywhere else. I had a lot of sort of, I had seen it within the continent and I was like, how come nobody knows about all these artists and creatives? And why is it that they don't have a platform that celebrates them? So it was a self-empowerment, self-determination moment. and I wanted it to be celebratory. So I thought, let's build a shop and then let's take all the aspects of African lifestyle and put it in the space so that people learn about our culture as well as come in and buy some of the beautiful things that I thought we could curate.

8:52So that was the essence of how we started. And the most interesting thing about this is that to encapsulate, like you said, a large continent into a shop. It's actually quite challenging. But I had traveled a lot, and I say to people, if I change Alara, I could change Alara every 30 days, and it would be extremely different all the time. So it became kind of performative and interesting and a journey of discovery. If you look at the store, the steps are showing you something new. So it was a story. And in doing that, I didn't know which way it would go. I just tried it. But I found that people got so intrigued and so into what we were doing.

9:32The celebratory part, the elevation part. I got a lot of support from creatives. I got a lot of support from everyone wanting to be part of this thing that we had created. So in that sense, I had more than I could deal with. But we found a way to curate the store with objects, with fashion, with art, in a way that that discovery journey kept being refreshed all the time. And it kept people's interest and it kept us growing in different directions. So we became a cultural hub where people wanted to learn more about what it is about this African creativity, our traditions. And that way we attracted a lot of people.

10:11So we continue to be very curatorial in what we do. But essentially we wanted to say what is the essence of what you do? What does it bring to the continent? What does it bring to the people of the continent? Who is it empowering? and those are the kind of things we think about when we think about people that we want to platform in Alara. So the idea of elevating but also empowering remains in everything that we do. Absolutely. So that's basically essentially how we choose and we have different steps as to what that is but largely we want to empower and we want to celebrate and we want to create objects that people covet.

10:51Right. We've talked about this before. establishing the difference between gaze and benefit. Yes. Because Africa certainly is in a moment of gaze, but there are those of us who stay focused on how we benefit from that gaze. What was the other part of the question? Oh, it was key milestones in taking Alara to the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, that has been super interesting. We've been open for 10 years. We've done a lot on the continent. And because of the model, which is kind of a model where people are now coming to, which is a model that encompassed a wide range of things, we got a lot of interest from people asking us, how do you do that?

11:35What does it look like? How do you manage it? And so we've had people interested in asking us, come over. We want to feel what you do and we want to learn more about how you've managed to do retail on this level, in this way that had been unusual. understanding that retail not traditionally is quite rigid and you wouldn't expect to go into a space where you could come in and it could be art today, it could be a dance performance tomorrow. So people have invited us, we've been to Brooklyn Museum where we were there for four months, this year we're going to LACMA Los Angeles Community Museum where we're also going to be there for another one year where people, they want to learn what we've done and how they can repeat it themselves.

12:19Wonderful. Laduma, Max Hossa has built a globally recognized fashion identity rooted in South African vibrance. More than that, you really are a 360 example of the African possibility in fashion, encompassing design, retail and manufacturing under one independent umbrella. Can you describe your creative process for us and what has been the key elements in taking your brand from your homeland, South Africa, to the global stage, as it were, the other global side? Thank you. Greetings to all the delegation and thank you so much, Razan, for making me part of this conversation and thank you so much to Imran for inviting us here.

13:11My design process stemmed from a thesis project that I did at the Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. And that was 15 years ago during the World Cup when we had a celebration moment in Johannesburg and other cities. So my thesis project was merely based on how do we take local traditional aesthetic and modernize them but yet at the same time address the big problem that we have in South Africa slash Africa of unemployment. And also considering environmental consciousness, Africa being a sustainable continent from centuries ago, I came up with an idea that how about I look into my own culture and take artifacts, but bring them into the modern, but yet preserve it for the future.

14:13Of course. In my culture, I'm from a community called the Kosa people. The Kosa people are the second biggest population in South Africa. The Kosa people. Wow. I almost got it. Nelson Mandela and various other figures are from that culture, but it's quite a rich culture that you find in over 200 clans. And as a person that has studied textiles in high school and university, I discovered that I could do a lot from the artifacts that come from my culture. But I stumbled upon an archive of beadwork that my ancestors and various other clans have been practicing in Africa. As you know, during colonization, the Dutch and the English used to bring commodities like beadwork to trade with the locals in exchange of cows or land.

15:07And Kosa people did embrace beadwork and they came up with extravagant beadwork that you, most of them, you find them in museums nowadays. You don't find them commonly in the street, you know. So I wanted to take that craft and put it back to the people. and I take motifs and then I modify them and then I came up with patterns that were infinite in terms of the design possibilities that I could create. And in my culture, every cosi young man that is 18 years old has to go through a circumcision ritual, which is a four-year process. A courier of passage. A rite of passage that happens in the forest and literally before you join that ritual, you have to give away all your belongings.

15:54And essentially the whole practice is about taking you as a man, your family is taking you as a man, and giving you a form of independence so that you never have to depend on your family again. So they buy you a sweater which is premium quality, shoes that are premium quality, and that's the last purchase that they're doing for your family. But then I look back while I was doing my thesis, I wanted to come up with a new attire for that culture, for that practice. And ironically, the clothes that we wear for the practice are westernized clothes. Your Lylan Scott brand, Pringle, whatnot, with Argyle motifs.

16:37And I eventually came up with the patterns and then came up with the concept that they could consider as part of alternative things to wear. But I also saw a gap that there isn't much African luxury products out there in the market. So I thought, let me target this concept to close that gap. Wonderful. I want to end, or wrap up rather, on thoughts around perception. A concept, those of us as ambassadors across the global South, I mean, I don't think this is just applicable to Africa, but across the global south generally. It is a concept that we have to always consider and regularly shatter more than those of us outside the global south.

17:27We've seen how the made-in label can generate ideas and associations from country to country. Made in Italy, for example, can have one typically thinking of quality craftsmanship and prestige. while Made in France carries immediate odes to luxury or croissants. When the world hears Made in South Africa, very quickly, what immediate associations should come to mind? Some of the immediate associations that I could think of is excellence. Thank you. Black excellence. And of course, we have a lot of unlearning to do. Because as the great writer Ben Oakley puts it, that there are three types of Africa.

18:16It's the Africa that we see on the news that with starving, with starvation, and the Africa that we live in that is constantly evolving. And then the Africa that people read about on the news. So we choose to be in the Africa that keeps evolving with possibilities and made in Africa in general should carry prestige and not cheap. It's not cheap. Yes, there's a pet perception that anything that is made in Africa should reasonably be priced or cheap. We put in our heart and souls into our work and present it to the world so that it sits next to their level of brands. We have about eight boutiques in all major cities in South Africa and New York, and we intentionally placed our brand next to your Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Zegna, Mont Blanc intentionally.

19:13As you should. Yeah, I love what you said about not cheap because in Kenya, for example, I mean, I'm Sudanese, but my second home is Kenya and a lot of my jewelry is made there and the women tend to make it whilst praying. And so they relieve their energy and they put it into the jewelry. So when I wear, it isn't just, you know, expensive by way of monetary value. It is expensive to me because it really is their heart and soul, their prayers, their good energy that I put on my body. So I completely agree with you on that. Rennie, made in Nigeria, what should be the immediate assumptions, immediate ideas to associate?

19:52Culture. Couture. Couture. Craftsmanship. Glamour. Glamour. Couture, naturally. Couture in the blood. I think it's important to highlight that. Yes. Because traditionally, we have made-to-measure clothes. I know everybody looks at the lens of old production, industrialization and stuff like that. But naturally and traditionally, we have made-to-measure, literally every week, you go to somebody to make your clothes to go to a wedding. Right. And when you see the women turn out, it's like they're going to the Met Gala. And I really do understand that people don't understand that that's actually our reality.

20:27Yeah, and it's the everyday. And it's literally everyday. And it's everyone. It's not just people of a certain strata. It's everyone. So everyone has someone who's making something from scratch for an event. And I think that's essentially what we do traditionally. I understand that to grow and stuff like that, you need industrialization. You need to change. But that is our essence. And I think that it's sustainable. We have a lot of huge human resources, people working, beading, stuff that you won't even understand or believe. And they do it fast, quick and regularly. Absolutely. And I think that is really our core strength.

21:02And I think we can grow a lot from that. Everything else regarding industrialization, I mean, I leave to you because I think collaboration with people like Maurice coming into Nigeria to help with production on that side might be interesting. But our core, our core is couture, is glamour, is celebration. And this is what I would say. And I feel this is very close also to the Middle East because as someone from both, I understand that, you know, our couture designers are on speed dial for regular, you know, and the average event. So I think this is a habit that is shared across regions. Maurice, made in Rwanda.

21:40Made in Rwanda. Just what I think, and it's fantastic because I think they should co-habit, you know, the brands, African brands, definitely being anchored in that craftsmanship that we do. But then again, when I talk about the possibility of also being able to produce for the world, the made in Rwanda, and I will say Ubuntability, and on purpose, because it's a Pan-African way, I've used the South African word, and our corporate social responsibility, which we are driving now to potentially the first African-grown and factory-grown social standard, because it was drafted by the factory workers themselves.

22:21and I've called, the program is called Pink Ubuntu and I've used the word Ubuntu, which comes from South Africa, but which is an African philosophy that you found in Kenya too, in South Africa, in Rwanda, it's Ubuntu and it can be summed up as I am because we are. And for me, when you hear made in Africa in the future, it should, we are now building business models that are anchored in our own culture in Ubuntu and I've even called the word Ubuntability. and Ubuntu ability should be our personal and collective responsibility in the African philosophy of I am because we are. And if we are going to move part of the production to Africa, we all have to be ready to respect that because it's the last frontier where we can really rebalance that.

23:09So made in Rwanda, made in Africa, Ubuntu ability. Lovely. Love that. Love that.

23:18I once said in an interview that the global South and Africa included isn't necessarily forging anew, but finally and rapidly remembering who they are. So thank you all very much for the return.

23:38The BOF podcast is edited and produced by Olivia Davies and Eric Bria. Thank you.