BUZIGAHILL
INTRODUCTION
‘Africa Rising’ sentiments have seen a celebration of the African entrepreneur making the impossible happen against all odds. But is this rise of the underdog a representation of ingenuity or systemic failures? And is it possible for our local entrepreneurs to find success on an international level?
Buzigahill, is a designer label that uses textile from second-hand clothing from the global north. Based in Kampala the founder and creative lead Bobby Kolade, created the brand as a way to challenge the status quo of clothing donations in Uganda from Canada, the UK, Germany and others. Along with Buzigahill, Kolade heads up Aiduke, an organization that supports Ugandan designers and research efforts within the clothing and textile industries.
Our conversation highlights the challenges of operating in Africa on a global scale; how local and international policy constrict small-scale African businesses and maintain colonial power structures; and the impact of these impediments – using Buzigahill Clothing Company and Aiduke Clothing Research Company as informal case studies.
Note: We encourage readers, though we focus on fashion, to think about other areas in which these trends are taking place; and to consider the scale of the impact in Africa, renown for its entrepreneurialism and youth culture because of its exceptionally high youth population.
MAKING AND RE-MAKING
Aiduke means ‘to make’ or ‘making’ in Ateso (local language). We really want to encourage people to make more locally, to use our own materials, and our own craftsmanship. [We want] to celebrate the idea of making, as opposed to [just] importing and consuming. So one of our first initiatives was to run a pop up shop for three months, which was a test to gauge the market and see how people respond to locally made products.
In 2021, Bobby Kolade took over leadership of the Fashion Council Uganda and re-branded it to Aiduke, with a focus on research in the local textiles industry and supporting fellow designers. From November 2021 to January 2022 he opened a pop-up store in Kampala featuring 10 Ugandan designers. The idea was to test out a physical space that could be a vehicle on how to approach the market.
We realized that it’s not enough for people to have made cute clothes and accessories. They also need to be able to access markets. It’s very difficult for them [local producers] to reach the market and to build scalable businesses. We need to get into an industrial level if they [designers] are to make a living and register their businesses and pay taxes. A lot of the time it’s a small-scale profession. Whereas if we want to see any sort of movement, we actually need businesses and systems so that people can access markets. Most designers in this country have not registered their businesses and are not paying taxes.
As a first toe in the water, the pop-up proved successful. It provided data to Aiduke that allows them to rethink business models, customer profiles and designer needs. Vintage clothing sold alongside locally made products proved that both had equal stakes in their market, designers were able to benefit from the structure of a concept store – shared marketing, retail and staffing resources, and clientele were introduced to makers they previously didn’t know.
TAILOR CULTURE
Nobody is supporting the designers in this climate. When I moved here there wasn’t anybody offering me advice or giving me the support I needed. I had to do all the research myself and invest the time to come to the level where I could set up Buzigahill [Bobby’s personal clothing company] – because I’ve done the research. But not everybody has four years to do research.
For many designers in Kampala, the ability to scale their businesses is limited – there are limited wholesale buyers locally, and exporting clothing is equally challenging. Added to this the financial capital required generally needs to be raised from personal resources, as there are little to no national/regional sources of funding for designers.
Institutionalized support iscrucial a in the development and sustainability of the creative industries. The absence of this support leaves many designers operating at reduced capacity – and this is what Aiduke was looking to respond to.
The main form of income as a designer here is custom-made clothing. So you still have somebody come to you, take the measurements, you make exactly what you want them to make, right. So on the one hand, the clients are losing out on innovation; The designer is actually just a tailor. And then the other issue is there’s only so much you can make. You need very wealthy clients to pay you a lot of money for the custom-made clothes, and making them takes time. And people aren’t paying enough for that kind of thing.
BUZIGAHILL & AIDUKE
We [Aiduke] are not fulfilling any gaps [needs] yet. So that’s why we specifically call ourselves a clothing research company. One research channel is Buzigahill, because we’re testing the waters ourselves, establishing an online shop that’s selling to global markets, trying to understand international trade laws and deals between the different trade blocks; to understand how Uganda can reach the world.
When Buzigahill launched its first collection, Return To Sender, Bobby was able to feed his learning into Aiduke and in turn research different export strategies to understand what it takes to get Ugandan apparel to a global market.
So it’s kind of my way of saying I’m not just going to make everything work for me. We need many businesses to work for any one business to take off properly. So it doesn’t help if Buzigahill is a successful brand if everybody else in the environment doesn’t have access to global markets or the infrastructure they need. It has to be a collective growth effort. I think the energy comes from the fact that I am also a designer, and I really want this to happen for myself. And, and right now I have the means to share the knowledge.
big laws, small business
I think the biggest learning so far has been that international trade law was designed for the global north, by people in the Global North, for them to win. It’s not designed for Uganda to have any sort of global impact on trade at all. There is massive scheme of exploitation that people don’t realize, but every time you go to a supermarket in Africa, just count how many products are from a different country than your own.
Because of Uganda’s limited local market size, it is important that small-scale businesses have the opportunity to sell regionally and globally. Trade policies, such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act [AGOA], are meant to facilitate this. Started in 2000 between Africa and the USA, AGOA is aimed to provide tax and import duties relief for East Africans exporting to the United States.
However, though this trade agreement exists, it provides limited support and protection for businesses from weaker economies. Uganda’s market must stay ‘open’ to businesses of all sizes, creating a difficult environment for local businesses to compete against larger American corporations. Small-scale designers like Bobby still have to navigate restricted space and opportunity in the global market. The global power imbalance creates real-world hurdles for young business owners in countries like Uganda
AGOA was created to favor American companies and American investors who want to produce goods here [Uganda] and send them back to the USA with massive tax cuts. Who’s actually making the money? They come here, they set up businesses here and then they export the raw materials to the global north with tax cuts, because there are these trade deals between all of these countries. The system isn’t interested in innovation in Africa, the system is only interested in extraction and disposal.
To participate in these policies, there are a number of qualifiers a business or product must adhere to. These policies favor locally made products and raw materials being exported from Uganda. Conversely, there are no policies managing the export of textile waste from the USA into Uganda.
Because we’re using secondhand clothes as our raw material [Imported from USA, Canada, Germany, UK], we are not eligible for this preferential status [for tax cuts]. And therefore, when we export our goods to the UK or to Europe, [there are] import tariffs. So that means if somebody in the UK orders a hoodie from us, we’re losing about 46 to 50% of our revenue, because we’re paying import duties. We’re paying VAT in the UK, because that’s where the product has been sold. On top of the shipping costs, we pay 18% agent fees. So it’s really, really complex. I have had to learn all this with the internet. And only now have we engaged a lawyer who has experience in commercial law because I’ve realized that there is a huge system to fight against. And then I asked myself, you know, these Europeans, they send all of their missions here into this country to implement sustainable development goals and circular economies and sustainability. Well, here we are, we found a way to upcycle your clothes and to create valuable jobs to skill people. We are working on developing a circular company, circular economy here. And your countries have created laws, which prevent us from benefiting from the trade deals that you’ve implemented. So how do I feel if 46% of the revenue of all the work we’ve done here is actually staying in Europe?
WHOSE CLOTHES ARE THESE ANYWAYS
If Kolade is working with the only textile available to him as a designer in Uganda second hand clothes , why doesn’t he get to enjoy the definition of his clothes being ‘made in Uganda’?.
It is now industry standard in the global textiles chain for a single item of clothing to have traveled thousands of kilometers and be produced in several countries – the sewing, spinning and attachments taking place in multiple locations, a single thread can contain cotton/polyester from multiple countries.
I spoke to Liz [The Or Foundation]. She said, in Italy all they do is they add buttons and labels and maybe a zip, and then the product is made in Italy. So why is it different for us in Uganda? Why? We believe that there is an inferiority complex happening here. Our customs office doesn’t have the confidence to say ‘this is a Ugandan product’. We’re being told that we’re not getting this certificate of origin. So who’s on our side? Why would a Ugandan customs office not even try to make an argument for our product being Ugandan in order for us to generate more revenue for them? And why would they rather that 46% of our revenue stays in Europe? [The Buzigahill team] fucking spent nine months making these clothes. And we made them in Uganda, there are Ugandan hands that made them, we used equipment that we bought in Uganda. The ideas grew here on Ugandan soil, Ugandan hands touching them. Why is this product not Ugandan? [It means] People are saying that, only if something was grown in the soil and has come out of the soil and has been extracted from the soil, only then is it Ugandan, truly Ugandan. How disrespectful is that to us as human beings? I think at the root of it all we can go back to the inferiority complex, we can go back to this sense of national pride that we’re trying to create. Made in Uganda .
Competing global interests manifest in a challenging business environment for entrepreneurs like Bobby. Historically, across the world,, local industries have grown as a direct result of protectionist policies from local government. So what does Uganda plan to do to protect its entrepreneurs trying to navigate global markets?
In the meantime, Bobby relies on the consciousness of local and global consumers to support products ‘Made In Uganda’. A business model that requires education of, as well as marketing to, potential consumers. Double the work.
HIGH COST OF IDEOLOGY
I don’t know other designers or people making clothes who have dealt with this kind of [trade] issue, because people [have] small businesses, where you sell a couple of things via Instagram. But a scalable business, that’s what we’re trying to build.
For Buzigahill, a major goal rests in challenging the trade routes and power imbalances left behind by colonialism. During and before the official colonial era (which ended for Uganda in 1962), trade patterns routes were mapped out which exported raw materials from Uganda (and the continent at large) to the coast. Raw materials processed in the global north were sold globally, including back to the global south with major margins in profit, little of it flowing back to the companies and individuals in the global south who made its production possible.
In the wake of our current sovereignty, the infrastructure and direction of these trade routes is still very active, continuing to chanel money in the direction of the global north.
The practical difficulties in challenging this reality reveals the weight of these systems on small-scale businesses.
It’s very depressing. It’s very, very depressing. After the first week, we launched [Return To Sender] I was very ecstatic. And I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually happening. People are placing orders. We’re talking to people in Belgium, Lithuania, the USA, the UK, Germany, Canada. This has potential.’ And then in the second week, we started getting the invoices. I knew we would lose substantially from our revenue, but I didn’t know to what extent. And obviously, we hadn’t been properly informed. We lost half of what we actually made, and then I was very upset. I was really upset. Because I felt cheated. And I consider myself to be very privileged in terms of access to information, access to internet, access to friends and help. How is somebody who’s just graduated from Makerere University supposed to even dream of building a business that’s going to export goods? How? Unless they’re the son of so and so. I felt like a fool. Because I was like, ‘why didn’t we just set up this business in Germany?
Kolade had the option of setting up the company in Germany whilst still producing in Uganda. however this would compromise the very essence of why this brand and collection were created.
We said, ‘No, we’re setting up the Ugandan company’. We want all the money to come back here. We want to pay our taxes here. And look at what we’re doing now. It’s like, we shot ourselves in the knee. So just in my mind, if I’ve sold a t-shirt for $100, and I’m only getting $55 back, it means, what I had envisioned to pay people, and the space that I had envisioned to build, that has to be pushed back. We’re not making enough money. And the amount of time we spent investing in these clothes, it’s not like we’ve just put up the prices because we fancy it, it’s just because they’re worth that much. And we’re not making enough money back at the moment. We want to build a factory. We’re not going to become millionaires by selling things and then getting only, you know, 55% of the revenue back, we still have to pay taxes in Uganda as well. I think we can feed this knowledge into Aiduke. And when we set up an online shop for Aiduke for other brands, we won’t have the same issues because we’ll have sorted out everything. So I’m still angry, I’m really angry with the global north, because they really cheated us. And they continue to do so. Legally, not even illegally. They’ve created the laws. And it’s still continuing. But I think we’ve come this far. And there is no way we can give up now. We’ve just spent too much love, time, money, energy. You just have to continue? You know.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SCALE
The economic realities in which we operate mean that scale is important for impact to be felt, for effect to take place.
If we don’t scale up, this will always be an art project. And I think, we’ve reached the point where we’re more than just art or fashion. There’s politics, economics, there’s humanity here, really. And in order for us to have an impact, we need to scale up. So physically speaking, we need to build a factory, we need at least 100 people working with us.
The economic realities in which we operate mean that scale is important for impact to be felt, for effect to take place.
I’m not looking for a factory with 3000 people or 50,000 people all doing the same boring job over and over again. No, no, no. It’s more like smaller groups of people working the way you see our studio. There’s one tailor who only works on the T-shirts, one works on shirts, one works on trousers and shorts on jackets. So I imagine them just expanding their teams. Just to have some sort of job diversity, and create a friendly atmosphere where people are earning good money, you know, where we create our own minimum wage, and people just live a good life. We are a total of six people full time, and three part time working on this [Buzigahill]. But we need to be 100 people for this to be a really impactful business. And we’re not going to be the only ones if we start a new force. If we are successful in a few years, people will follow suit, and that will have more of an impact. People will leave our company with skills that they’ve learned, people will try and replicate things that we’re doing. And that’s what having an impact really is. We worked with seven bales [~200 items of clothing per bale], that’s nothing. It’s a statement what we’re doing. But what if we were able to work with 200, 300, 400 bales? What if we were able to work with exporters in Canada? Getting some sort of two-way conversation between the global north and south. Because right now, it’s just one way, it’s not a conversation. It’s a command from, from the other side.
Though the ideology and current practices are to be applauded, within the current climate, the question of how these operations will scale up to create the impact intended remains to be seen. Will the increasing consciousness of the populations, entrepreneurs and creators generate influence with policy makers?
It feels like on the continent there’s a shift – it’s not huge, but there’s a small shift of young people waking up. [Asking] ‘Hold on a second, who wrote that law?’ ‘Why is this happening?’ ‘Why haven’t our parents done or said anything?’ I feel like we’ve just started. You just have a sense that people are working on things. There’s that collective spirit.