Made-in-Africa Fashion Brand Pioneers Aim for Global Success

African fashion brands have not always been the first place fashionistas turned to when shopping for new clothes or shoes in developed economies. While Africa has long been a source of inspiration in contemporary and traditional fashion, the continent has had a weak reputation for manufacturing and selling mass market global fashion brands.

There are initiatives, such as Origin Africa (http://originafrica.org/), an ongoing campaign working to improve African trade by increasing the trade of textiles and apparels, cut flowers, specialty foods, home décor, and fashion accessories. Origin Africa matches African designers and entrepreneurs with experienced industry leaders to “facilitate, coordinate and advance ‘trade, not aid’ efforts”.

While there are many places in Africa engaged in the global clothing manufacturing outsource industry – often paying very low wages – strong African fashion brands are often absent in most developed countries. Well, at least until now.

Two recent examples have joined the well-publicized success of Ethiopia’s soleRebels, maker of rubber-soled shoes (solerebelsfootwear.co). SoleRebels became an Internet success story, harnessing the power of web-based sales to reach customers around the world.

Now another Ethiopian shoe maker is also pushing its way into the global fashion scene. Ethiopian-made sneaker brand Sawa has just been picked up by the American retailer of preppy clothing J. Crew (jcrew.com). The successful catalogue and online clothing retailer has great clout when it comes to promoting a brand, and this should be a big boost to the reputation of African fashion labels.

Sawa’s headquarters is in Paris, France (the physical home of much of the world’s fashion scene) but all its shoes are sourced and made in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, and the company’s website is run from there.

Sawa says the key to its success is to be a business first and foremost – not a charity.

“Sawa project does not have the so-called generosity of brands which use Africa just to glorify themselves,” said Wendesen Birhanu, on the company website.

“Sawa is a fashion brand which has taken the challenge to fabricate shoes in Africa. All the added value benefits the continent.”

The company’s shoe factory is modern and has the workers positioned at their desks making the shoes. The brand logo proudly states “Made in Africa” on all the brown cardboard shoe boxes in a bold, red roundel stamp.

Sawa also uses the slogan “vote with your feet” to show the connection between purchasing the shoes and supporting African business and manufacturing.

The footwear, currently available in the United Kingdom, France and through J. Crew in the United States, has a distinctive rubber sole with the African continent embossed on the bottom – a clever design tweak ensuring the wearers will leave an interesting footprint wherever they walk.

The styles available include Dr Bess, a vintage canvas and leather shoe in a low-cut silhouette. The Tsague is a vintage shoe with a mid cut like that used for basketball shoes.

The shoes have been put through their paces in an independent quality assurance lab and each shoe’s details are explained on the Sawa website (http://www.sawashoes.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=8&lang=en).

They retail in Europe for between 75 euros and 115 euros a pair – a middle-market price – and come in eye-pleasing colours, from basic black to white to sand, dark blue, grey, brown, red and light blue.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium_enterprises) have been identified as an essential part of Africa’s future prosperity and key to its ability to reduce poverty and achieve development objectives like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (www.un.org/millenniumgoals).

Obstacles to growth for SMEs include poor infrastructure, unreliable power supplies, unscaleable business models, low quality standards and poor quality branding and design.

Developing manufacturing in Africa is key to improving incomes and wealth. Creating unique, branded products for overseas markets makes it possible to earn foreign currency and be able to benefit from consumers in other countries. The math is simple: once you have saturated the local market for your product, the only way to boost sales and profits is to seek new customers elsewhere. By selling to people in a country with a higher national income, it is possible to charge more and in turn earn more money for each product. In time, this can lead to significant income rises and in turn, human development gains as the spare cash can be put to improving local living conditions, acquiring education or better health services and consuming better quality food.

Another important feature of selling to overseas customers is competition. Having to compete with the pick of the world’s top brands means a company must raise its game to stand a chance. The pressure forces the company to sharpen its product line, become more efficient, stick to strict quality control and embrace the latest thinking in design, marketing and information technologies.

In short, an African company that can weather a few years successfully selling to overseas customers is going to be a fierce competitor back home.

And, as has been forecast many times, the rise of Africa’s middle class consumers will be a big driver of economic growth in the next decade. If this middle-income consumer class buys lots of African-made consumer products, then the impact on job and wealth creation on the continent will be significant.

Another fashion initiative boosting brand Africa is a partnership between Italian fashion lifestyle clothing retailer Diesel (diesel.com) and the Edun ethical fashion label (edun.com), founded by Ali Hewson and her husband Bono, singer with rock band U2.

The collaboration offers a contemporary take on retro street wear from Africa’s past, while having all the garments made and sourced from Africa.

In March 2013, Diesel+EDUN launched a 25-piece denim collection drawing its inspiration from African creativity. The collection uses raw, untreated denim sourced and manufactured in Uganda. It mixes up Malian textile prints for linings, with outside embroidery drawing on traditional Zulu weaving patterns. It also includes a denim jacket inspired by street wear from 1970s South Africa.

Edun was originally set up to encourage greater trade with Africa as a way to address poverty and boost incomes. Begun in 2005, the brand has tried to overturn the perception that ethical and ecologically sound fashion can’t be fashionable and desirable too.

Edun has sought to be “a creative force in contemporary fashion”, according to its website. In 2007, it launched a line dedicated to making t-shirts entirely made in Africa called Edun Live. Edun Live t-shirts “are entirely ‘Grow to Sew’ African. From cotton to finished tee, all production takes place in Africa.”

Edun has the goal of producing 40 per cent of its fashion collection in Africa by 2013. It does this by “supporting manufacturers, infrastructure and community building initiatives”.

All of Edun’s cotton is harvested to CCIU cotton standards. The Conservation Cotton Initiative Uganda (CCIU) is a cotton-farming program that helps to build sustainable farming communities in Northern Uganda.

Edun is currently working in Kenya, Morocco, Madagascar, Uganda and Tunisia.

The Diesel+EDUN (http://www.diesel.com/diesel+edun/) collaboration had its start at the beginning of 2012. After trips to East and West Africa by Diesel founder Renzo Rosso and Edun founders Ali Hewson and Bono, the idea was hatched to work together to “further apparel trade and development in Africa”. The goal is “bringing business to the continent and highlighting to the fashion world the possibility for sustainable trade and creative opportunity in Africa.”

More than 5,000 farmers participated in the 2011/2012 CCIU program, and more than 8,000 have already enrolled in the 2012/2013 season, the website states.

Edun is also working with Mikono Knits (Mikonoknits.com) to promote traditional African knitting techniques.  Founded in 2005 by Froydis Dybahl Archer, Mikono makes and sells hand-crocheted sweaters and tank tops from its Nairobi, Kenya workshop. The plan is to use the success of Mikono Knits to expand the number of underprivileged women the firm can hire to work for the business. The business currently employs 10 women and uses locally sourced organic cotton and wool, supporting the local economy.

Beyond the actual clothing partnership and African-inspired fashion, there is a clever promotion campaign to raise awareness for the Diesel+EDUN line. Called Studio Africa (http://studioafrica.tumblr.com/), it is a marketing and perception-shaping initiative, “celebrating and promoting creativity in Africa”. It is doing this by promoting nine African artists to better communicate the African vibe of the collection and give the artists’ careers a boost. It is curated and edited by Okay Africa (http://www.okayafrica.com/), a cultural guide to “all the latest music/culture/politics coming from Africa and the Diaspora”.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: March 2013

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Shoes with Sole: Ethiopian Web Success Story

Ethiopia’s bustling capital, Addis Ababa, is experiencing a building and business boom. Foreign investors and Ethiopia’s entrepreneurial and widespread global diaspora are investing again in the country. But Ethiopia still relies for most of its foreign currency wealth on exports of unprocessed coffee beans and leather hides — a model that leaves the bulk of the profits made outside of Ethiopia.

But one shoe company provides an example of a home-grown business that is finding success in the international marketplace, while repatriating most of the profits for its goods back to Ethiopia, creating jobs and local wealth.

Ethiopia’s economy is mostly dependent on agriculture, which accounts for 60 percent of exports and 80 percent of employment (CIA World Factbook). The country has a tiny private sector and high youth unemployment. It is difficult to find funding for small businesses. Yet, because of the high population growth, the country needs to create more jobs.

The Economist magazine has forecast Ethiopia’s economy will grow by 7 percent in 2010, becoming the fifth fastest growing economy in the world, and on course to surpass Kenya to become East Africa’s biggest economy. While this sounds impressive, the country has to run hard to create enough jobs to meet its growing population and still faces significant food security problems.

One company, soleRebels, is combining a clever twist on a local tradition – recycling rubber from old truck tires into shoes, locally known as selate shoes – with sophisticated design concepts and high quality craftsmanship to make a global footwear hit.

Co-founder and managing director Bethleham Tilahun Alemu, a 30-year-old African web-vending entrepreneur, has turned this local craft into a global fashion design hit by adding colourful cotton and leather uppers to the tire shoes. The recycled rubber shoes come in many styles: from handmade flip-flops to boat shoes, loafers, and athletic trainers resembling the popular American sports shoe, Converse (http://www.converse.com/).

SoleRebels’ (http://solerebelsfootwear.weebly.com/index.html) shoe factory is on the outskirts of Addis Ababa in the historic village of Zenabework. Despite its location, it is reaching the international markets through online retailers like Amazon.com. Shipments take between three and five days to arrive in the United States.

And the secret to this small start-up’s success? Apart from great shoes and funky design, Alemu puts it down to this: “We are sitting in Addis Ababa but acting like an American company,” she told The Guardian newspaper.

It doesn’t hurt that Alemu is also money-smart: she is a former accountant.

Started five years ago, soleRebels now employs 45 full-time staff making 500 pairs of shoes a day. The shoes cost between US $33 and US $64. They are also being sold in Japan and the United Kingdom on Amazon’s shoe-selling website, http://www.javari.co.uk.

In 2010, Alemu hopes soleRebels will make US $481,000. But soleRebels has an even more ambitious goal: to become “the Timberland or Sketchers of Africa.”

Timberland (http://www.timberland.com/home/index.jsp), an American shoe and boot maker, has been a pioneer in high-quality leather footwear, breaking new ground in adopting green manufacturing processes and exploiting the power of the web by allowing customers to customise their footwear.

SoleRebels has cleverly exploited the advantages of the global marketplace to grow its customers and profits. The business has done this with just one leg-up: a line of credit from the government to help with large orders. With 6.2 million people out of a population of 80 million needing food aid, Ethiopia is still highly dependent on international aid. But Alemu is showing there is a way to build a sustainable successful business.

Inspiration for Alemu came about when she was thinking what Ethiopian product could be produced in a sustainable way. She remembered the sandals worn in the country.

“Recycling is a way of life here – you don’t throw things away that you can use again and again,” she said. “I wanted to build on that idea.”

Ethiopian shoe makers have had a difficult time in recent years, trying to compete with cheaper Chinese imports. But rather than just trying to come up with a shoe that was even cheaper than the Chinese ones, soleRebels decided to build a business selling shoes to the more lucrative export market.

Alemu reasoned that good design would attract a higher price. She did research on the internet to find out which designs worked well and what were the latest trends in footwear.

This research formed the basis of her range of shoes, which have catchy names like Class Act or Gruuv Thong. The sandals and flip-flops are either cotton-covered or leather covered. The Urban Runner shoe sells best and is inspired by the Converse All Star sneaker.

SoleRebels has a regular supplier of old truck tires and inner tubes and has women weave and dye the cotton, jute and hemp uppers for the shoes. Almost all materials are locally sourced. Old army uniforms are cannibalized for their camouflage pattern.

SoleRebels has also been canny in seeking Fair Trade certification (http://www.fairtrade.org.uk) to help with marketing and selling the shoes.

To increase the market for the shoes, Alemu bombarded American retailers with emails and shoe samples to pique their interest. Because of the U.S. African Growth and Opportunity Act (http://www.agoa.gov), soleRebels’ shoes can be imported into the United States duty-free: a big price advantage in the U.S. marketplace which has helped grab the interest of retailers like Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters.

This interest soon snowballed, and people were placing orders through the soleRebels website (http://solerebelsfootwear.weebly.com/index.html). Orders come by courier from Ethiopia in about a week to the United States.

With all this interest building, Amazon, the leviathan online retailer, decided to become a customer for the shoes. Online retailing has been a huge boost to the growth of soleRebels. According to Alemu, it has enabled the company “to understand the market needs and demands in real time” — a huge advantage to a start-up company far away from its markets.

There is another advantage to using the web to grow a business: it has enabled soleRebels to take greater control of the whole process. The company negotiates directly with retailers, handling orders and credit collection, and this makes sure most of the profits of the business return to Ethiopia.

Making soleRebels quickly profitable has been a benefit to its workers. Starters at the company make US $1.92 a day, while experienced shoe-makers earn US $11 a day (a good wage in Ethiopia).

“In Ethiopia we have become used to taking money from the West, to always getting help,” Alemu told the Guardian. “That does not make for a sustainable economy. We need to solve our own problems.” And what does success enable them to do? SoleRebels are now building a solar-powered factory to replace their current workshop. And there is a steely pride in the firm’s success: “People buy soleRebels because they are good, not just because they are green or from Ethiopia,” Alemu said. “Our product speaks for itself.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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