Iniobong Onunkwo, founder, Little Weavers: My aim is to

Iniobong Okon Obinna Onunkwo is the Founder, Creative Director and CEO of Little Weavers, a fashion brand for young people.

For over 10 years, she has been teaching children about different cultures in Africa through fashion. Recently, she had an exhibition in Lagos, after which she spoke with Saturday Sun.

In this interview with CHRISTINE ONWUACHUMBA, she spoke about fashion, culture and kids.

Can you tell us about ‘Lttle Weavers.

Little Weavers is an Afrocentric fashion brand for young people, that is, toddlers to teenagers.

What you do with their fashion?

We strive as much as possible to entertain the children using African and weaving fabrics, patterns to tell them more about the African cultural heritage. We also provide them with African costumes and celebrate our different cultures and tribes around Africa.

For how long have you been doing this?

We have done this for 10 years. We have marked our 10th anniversary, which is also like birthing a baby 10 years ago and watching the baby grow. The business was launched in May 2013 and we are very grateful to all our customers, family and friends and for all our support system that have been able to go on this journey with us and help us grow, to learn and even with all the experiences in this particular economy.

How have you been able to sustain the brand?

To be able to sustain the brand, the first thing is, what was it that got me passionate about me kick-starting? Initially it was more of a dream. Then we found out that it was an opportunity for us to serve an underserved market where little children really do not have much of African clothing. Again, we still use the opportunity to teach them more about cultural heritage. So when you talk about sustainability, we are leveraging on technology and informing them consistently on appreciating the African value and culture through fashion; letting them understand why we have different clothing in different African regions, tribes and what the dynamics of those clothing means to the respective culture or tribe. So part of our sustainability is to entertain the young people as well as constantly providing them with interesting materials to keep that legacy.

At the time we started the brand we realised that it wasn’t only about using African prints to create trendy styles for the children. We realised that it was also important that they understood where most of these clothing came from. For instance, we have different woven fabrics from different African cultures. We have Aso Oke. We also have tie and die which is a commonly used fabric right now. People need to understand the pattern of those adire fabrics. Even from the South East, we have akwete.

How are you able to create this aspect of educating the children and letting them realise that their culture is very rich?

We do things like exhibitions, fashion shows, and those shows are like forms of educating the children, getting them interested and creating appealing outfit that will make them go on the runway and talk so much about it. It is usually a very interesting and fun period for them.

How were you able to create that awareness about all these to the wider audience?

One of those things is leveraging on technology. So on our technology space we have our website, and social media handles. We are working and collaborating with certain tech people to see how we can animate some of these clothing and use them as an entertaining kind of series or documentary, travelling to different places and regions and telling these children more about our different cultures, animate it and then see child models and teenage models put on these clothing. I think it’s also a way we can be able to connect with them.

So the beauty of African cultural heritage clothing and fashion is that we are leveraging on the craftsmanship of the people existing in that community. For example, if I know that I will be able to get an affordable fabric like adire, I’ll have to understand the dynamics of the craftsmanship and terms of the market compared to clothing coming in as export, having taken into consideration the foreign exchange fluctuations and the value of our local currency. If you take all these things into consideration, you will understand that really there is so much beauty, affordability, sustainability, and originality in wearing our clothing because it’s authentic right from the craftsmanship. It’s original and has so much passion and love in producing it during the production process.

One of the beauties of having these little weavers is that the parents have the opportunity to come and we can do what they call twining of outfit where the parents can twin with their children. We do the same tailoring for those parents that like to wear resemblance outfit with their children. Last year we were part of the privileged designers to work on the African Fashion Week Nigeria and it’s interesting that we decided to test run our adult line to see the reaction of people, and we got a wonderful feedback from the Princess of the Ooni of Ife.

So, I am telling people all over the world to strive as much as possible to let their children know more about Africa through fashion and the best place to learn it is go to our social media handles.