I love a good handmade bag, especially when it’s colourful and comes with a great story. Imagine my excitement when learning about AAKS, which ticks every single box.
From her home in London, founder Akosua Afriyie-Kumi often travelled to Ghana to visit her family. With a degree in fashion under her belt, she decided to return to her native country to build a luxury brand that was proudly African.
What followed was an intense country-wide search to find the weavers to work with. The bags are weaved with raffia, a biodegradable product that is soft and easily malleable. Though northern Ghana has a long standing weaving tradition, straw was normally used and it took a long time to find the skilled enough weavers that could turn the raffia into luxury bags.
The raffia is ecologically harvested by Ghanian farmers. It is then dyed with natural dyes in hot baths of water to bring the intense colours come to live. It takes up to a week for a weaver to handcraft one bag. After finishing the weaver will proudly add a personal label, so the new owner can read on the AAKS website whose skilful hands made her new favourite handbag. All together it makes AAKS a perfect example of slow, conscious fashion, that will hopefully continue to conquer the world in 2015!