PYMNTS Summer Series: African Diasporic Brands Go Mainstream With The Folklore

Discovery takes many forms, a popular one being delving into our ancestral roots and coming away inspired by cultural heritage, music, literature and most definitely fashion.

It’s a path that took Amira Rasool, founder and CEO at The Folklore Group, from undergrad at Rutgers University to a visit to South Africa, where she was energized by the land of her ancestors and began building a vision for popularizing diasporic fashion in new ways.

In a conversation with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Rasool said during that revelatory travel experience, “I found local designers, purchased a few pieces and I couldn’t believe I didn’t know about any of these designers. I knew about all the Valentinos and the Guccis and even the small New York brands, but didn’t know there was a talent pool like this in South Africa.”

That was 2016. When she returned to New York, people began stopping her on the street asking where she got her cool sandals or fabulous top — and that’s when the lightbulb lit up.

“A lot of the brands were not stocked in retail stores outside of their country, and this wasn’t just a South African problem, it was a problem for the entire continent,” she said. “Even looking within the U.S. and seeing a lot of Black-owned designer brands had that same issue, the idea was sparked by my love for fashion and really being able to find unique and creative pieces.”

Fashion and cultural love then took form as The Folklore Group, an eCommerce marketplace that helps designers in Africa get in front of shoppers worldwide. Rasool calls it, “Being able to dip my foot in social activism through creating a company that’s sustainable and socially motivated.”

See also: Social Commerce Unlocks Growth for Brands, FinTechs in Africa

After initially launching in 2018 as a direct-to-consumer (D2C) eCommerce marketplace selling curated fashions from African designers, she said, “We decided to shift our focus to The Folklore Connect, which is our B2B platform, because we saw that there could be a bigger impact in helping these brands get into more retail stores and inevitably more consumers’ hands.

“Instead of us being in charge of customer experience, heading fulfillment, all of these very tricky, expensive, time-consuming things that would take our attention away from our primary product, Connect, we decided that we still want to have a place where consumers can discover these brands,” and support them via a dialed-in D2C platform, she said.

Connecting Demand With Supply

These realizations led to focusing more intently on The Folklore Connect, the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace platform within a platform that’s helping promote and scale diasporic brands to the world.

Rasool likened the concept to FARFETCH — one of their retail partners — saying, “We’re aggregating products from designers, from retailer’s websites as well as brand websites, so consumers are also able to choose where they buy it, they can compare shipping, they can compare pricing, and they have access to these brands. It’s the purpose of shopping aggregate.”

The Folklore Connect beta site launched in April. Rasool told Webster it’s a B2B wholesale eCommerce platform “that empowers global retailers to discover and shop African and diasporic brands,” adding that the objective is “to connect retailers big and small, specialty stores as well as department stores and boutiques with designers that for so long have not had access to these retailers,” as vice versa with retailers that knew nothing of dazzling African brands.

Once a brand is vetted, they can upload products to the marketplace for wholesale availability to retailers worldwide.

“They’re able to link their bank accounts, and then they’re able to accept orders and payment through credit card, wire transfer, ACH,” she said. “Once they accept the order and accept the payment, they’re able to generate shipping documents automatically and ship the items directly from production facilities to the retailers.”

Read more: Homegrown Super Apps Shape the Future of Mobile-First African Market

Keeping to its mission and vision of promoting African brands to consumers who keep buying apparel despite the recession, Rasool said The Folklore offers several ways to search and discover, partly due to her own content background as a journalist with fashion industry bibles including Marie Claire, Women’s Wear Daily and V Magazine.

Retailers seeking new looks can discover diasporic brands with searches like “LGBTQI brands” or “women-owned brands” that will also suggest related merchandise. Product level search enables seeing specific characteristics like size, fit, color and other vital decisioning intel.

“They’re able to, just like a traditional eCommerce experience, add the items to cart, how many they want of each, and then they’re able to see when it would ship,” Rasool said. “They’re able to pay and take out a line of credit as well, which allows them to have net 30 and net 60 terms, which is a really exciting part about what we’re doing.”

Hedging With Wholesale

While many of the new discoverability features were built in-house, Rasool said The Folklore Group is partnering with a payments firm to handle that highly complex part of the business.

“We are trying to solve for one primary thing right now, which is connection and transaction, or two primary things,” she said. “Building a whole payments system is a beast of its own.”

The other beast her team manages is not just finding unique African designers, but helping them source manufacturing and scale up appropriately, making sure in-demand fashions are in stock and available for shipping as would be expected in any eCommerce transaction.

While several brands available from The Folklore Group handle their own production, she said that for smaller brands — the bulk of those selling on The Folklore — “we are working on partnerships with different companies that help smaller brands source production facilities.”

“Any brand that joins Connect will have access to discounted services from these organizations,” Rasool said. “We focus on not just providing the tech and saying, ‘Here, figure it out.’ We want to be able to provide as many resources as possible, and we know that we can’t do it all ourselves.”

Brands still maintain control of how much product is produced and where it’s sold. This is important to all brands, and perhaps more so to diasporic brands steeped in African culture.

“Different brands have different ambitions,” she said. “We’re just here to support them in being able to accomplish whatever goals they set.”

With an innate fashion and business sense, Rasool said the hard part for her in getting a B2B wholesale eCommerce marketplace off the ground was technology.

“I’m not a technical founder. I don’t code,” she said. “We brought in our head of engineering and he’s leading the charge there and building a great engineering team. That’s probably the part where you don’t realize how intricate it is in UX, UI, and learning all these things.”

Related: Leading Online Retailers Make Customer Experience Part of the Product

Learnings extend to what retail clients consider in their wholesale purchasing. Acknowledging the role of pre- and post-sale data, she said even those insights don’t always spot the trends, which is why she spends three months a year shopping little boutiques in South Africa.

“I don’t think any of the retailers predicted that loungewear was going to be such a big hit in 2020 and 2021, but now they are recognizing that,” she said. “People are going out. They have been cooped up in the house and they want to be able to go out and express themselves through fashion. A lot of retailers are noticing that occasionwear is very popular right now.”

Part of the beauty of The Folklore Group’s business model is keeping up a dialogue with tiny brands that in turn know their customers, making for less waste and more bespoke outfits. Rasool said many of these small brands keep sustainability up front, which is where The Folklore Group can help “not over produce, but just produce based off of demand, rather than try to predict how much people are going to love a particular item.

“It’s a resource thing as well. It’s more difficult to source and produce, and more expensive sometimes to do this in Africa, so just being mindful of cost is also an important part of growing these brands.”

Rasool also said The Folklore’s model is allowing brands and retailers to weather macroeconomic headwinds.

“Whereas they might have taken a hit when it comes to their direct-to-consumer business, we’re going to be able to accelerate what they’re doing in wholesale 2x, 3x, 4x,” she said. “That’s not coming from a standpoint of me being oblivious of what’s going on, but boutiques are still buying because they still have customers that are buying.”

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