Made in Africa 2: How to reinvent the competitiveness of African goods ?

Success Story in Fashion: Christie Brown

Founded in 2008, Christie Brown is a Ghanaian brand that pays tribute to the founder’s grandmother, a seamstress, through Aisha Ayensu. The brand’s creative signature is deeply rooted in Ghanaian tradition, drawing on techniques and cultural references that are both authentic and innovative. Christie Brown is synonymous with quality and innovation. The brand stands out for its clear positioning and carefully curated offering, balancing traditional African aesthetics with contemporary fashion trends. Its target audience is urban women who are anchored in tradition yet have a contemporary approach to fashion. With 100% local production and an almost fully integrated supply chain, the designs are created in-house. The textiles-including prints, kente, and batik-are sourced locally, often produced in Ghana or neighboring countries. This approach supports local craftsmanship and strengthens the brand’s ties to the local economy and know-how.

As for distribution, the brand is structured around a boutique in Accra, a network of international distributors, and direct sales via an e-commerce site launched in 2015 to expand its global reach, with a growing international clientele. WhatsApp has also become a key channel for engaging customers and announcing new collections and special capsules. The brand’s financing and governance demonstrate how the right investment at the right time can shape a brand’s trajectory. Christie Brown was launched with a $20,000 loan, which was repaid within a year. Since then, it has relied primarily on organic growth, supported by a robust corporate governance structure with dedicated roles (COO, CFO, CMO, and retail), contributing to its operational efficiency and growth.

The brand operates on a hybrid revenue model (1), combining in-store and online sales. It has adopted a seasonal model that has resulted in impressive annual revenue growth, reaching $990,000 in 2023 (compared to $650,000 in 2021). This level of revenue is remarkable and far exceeds that of many other brands on the continent. As it continues to grow, the brand is exploring outsourcing part of its production to Turkey to circumvent inefficiencies in the local supply chain and high operating costs, which impact net margins (around 10%).

How can such a brand ensure its expansion while maintaining quality, authenticity, and a strong African identity?

Christie Brown’s experience shows that investing in fashion can no longer be limited to mentoring programs that aim to turn creatives into CEOs without equipping them with strategic skills in marketing, distribution, and financial management. It also demonstrates the value of innovation: reinterpreting tradition, adapting to the times, developing an omnichannel sales strategy, forging strategic collaborations, and placing sustainability and craftsmanship at the heart of customer loyalty. Christie Brown is a model of sustainable African success, built on cultural authenticity, local production, solid governance, and a multichannel distribution strategy, despite major operational challenges and the absence of significant external funding.

How can we support such a brand to break the glass ceiling, expand local production, and develop a pan-African distribution network?

Four Pathways to strengthen the competitiveness of Made in Africa

1. Clusters and Industrialization

The creation of clusters and shared workshops would allow for the mutualization of production tools, reducing costs, and improving quality. One can look to the Portuguese model for inspiration. According to a study by AICEP and EY, in 2023 Portugal exported about $6.85 billion worth of textiles, making the textile sector the country’s fourth largest export. These results are possible in part due to an integrated value chain in the north of the country, covering everything from spinning to garment making, dyeing, and finishing.

For African countries, investing in local processing of raw materials, such as cotton and leather, would strengthen control over the value chain and create added value on the continent.

2. Training and Team Structuring

It is essential to encourage complementarity between creatives and managers. Success does not depend on turning every designer into a CEO, but on building teams where everyone brings their expertise. Hybrid training programs-combining textile innovation, management, marketing, and logistics-must be developed to support this evolution.

Since 2023, we have been involved in training programs such as Lagos x Paris (Nigeria) and Création Botswana (Botswana). In each of these programs, we support solo entrepreneurs to build stronger brands, develop coherent collections, export to foreign markets, budget and manage available financial resources, or seek capital-skills that require quality training, experience, and a solid network. No single profile can possess all these assets, no matter how willing. This is a fundamental economic principle: divide labor to optimize each stage of the chain.

3. Promoting Craftsmanship and Storytelling

Building strong brands requires understanding the market, the zeitgeist, and serving customers consistently over time. To do so, one must craft a unique narrative and stand out. On a continent that is last to industrialize, other assets remain underestimated and underexplored-namely, local heritage and know-how, which are powerful levers for differentiation. A unique storytelling approach, combined with a demand for quality, would justify a premium or even luxury positioning and attract customers who are sensitive to what African production can offer.

4. Political and Economic Support

African governments cannot shy away from the mission of building a favorable framework with incentives for entrepreneurs and investors. This key role involves fiscal policies, subsidies, intellectual property protection, the promotion of intra-African trade, and especially the development of “Made in local” quality labels to strengthen consumer confidence, increase the visibility of local products, and develop regional specialties.

Recent initiatives in Rwanda and Benin are commendable. However, their medium- and long-term impact remains limited because value chains are not vertically integrated, still largely depend on imports of semi-processed materials, or, worse, production is not of high added value or is simply dedicated to export markets via free zones that allow companies to bypass local taxes and import off quotas to the EU and the US. So, instead of developing an African exception, these policies focus on specialization based on volume, low labor costs, and preferential tariffs-which, as demonstrated by the Trump administration, can disappear at any time. Asian companies, especially Chinese ones, benefit most from these loopholes, sheltered from Washington’s aggressive policies, without having a continent to build or generations to train.

The African continent has the potential to become a global reference in the production of creative and authentic consumer goods for its domestic market, which has unique cultural preferences and habits. This will require courage to move beyond isolated artisanal models, invest in smart industrialization-or, more elegantly, in “small-scale manufacturing”-and, above all, recognize that success depends on complementarity of talents and integrated value chains.

It is along this path that “Made in Africa” could gain the resources to shine-not only as an exception, but as a standard of excellence and innovation, free from Western dictates, to create a new language true to African values. This vision of the future will be built through excellence, a confident pan-Africanism, and the ability to work together, each in their area of expertise, to bring forth a powerful, sustainable, and inclusive creative economy that generates wealth for Africans.

cover image : Christie Brown
(1) Source : Crea Fund, success stories in creative industries in Africa