Twenty-seven-year-old Yolanda Ngwenya has always dreamed of being a fashion designer and sees it as a vehicle to showcase her Ndebele heritage.
She started Bakhar, a high-end fashion brand in April 2016.
Bakhar means “The Chosen One” and her vision for the brand was to dress women that thrive on authenticity and style with an edge.
Fashion designing best defines who I am because it incorporates all of my passions in one, those passions being art, music, literature and history
UNESCO's ResiliArt Accelerator Project capacitates 5 women creatives from Zimbabwe
Since inception, the brand has had notable achievements, including being featured at the Durban Fashion Fair, a Bakhar gown showcasing in New York, Miss Tourism Zimbabwe and Ibumba Festival.
Although she has made inroads in the regional fashion industry, the feisty entrepreneur wanted to rebrand her business and tap into the wider African market.
I want to have Bakhar factories, studios and stores across the continent, with African artisans working in them to further establish our African identity. My goal is to be recognised as a key player in the creative industry worldwide
This is why she gravitated to the ResiliArt Accelerator program, a platform “ curated for creatives” by UNESCO. This program was designed for female creatives in Zimbabwe, to equip them with entrepreneurial skills to formalise and upscale their creative businesses, in collaboration with MotoRepublik (a creative hub that respond to the need for space where young people could meet, collaborate and come up with big ideas to transform Zimbabwe) and supported by the Government of Japan.
A key takeaway for me in this project, was developing an operational plan for my business. Now I know how to budget plan for an event, for a collection, for the year. I can forecast how much money and workforce I will need to complete a particular project
It’s important for Yolanda and her business to create partnerships with fellow fashion designers in Africa. So, when she was paired with Omoyemi Akerele, as her mentor for 6 months in the program, she saw this as a steppingstone towards her dream.
Ms. Akerele is the founder and CEO of Lagos Fashion Week, Style House Files, and special advisor to the Nigerian Export Promotion Council. Her expertise, network, and experience in the African fashion landscape provided Bakhar with a wealth of knowledge on how to take the business to the level she envisions for it.
I got to see real-time what it means to have a fashion business. For example, I found out how to package collections from Omoyemi, how to ensure my collections are ready to sell or pitch to fashion retailers. This is a huge gap in Zimbabwe, as fashion designers we know how to create but we do not know how to sell our products; how to network with buyers or how to pitch our brands to retailers
Not only did she get to learn from the powerhouse entrepreneur, but she got to have a taste of Africa’s largest fashion event, Lagos Fashion Week in October 2022.
Not only did she get to learn from the powerhouse entrepreneur, but she got to have a taste of Africa’s largest fashion event, Lagos Fashion Week in October 2022.
Lagos was an experience I will never forget, I had an all-access pass to the event, from backstage to the runway. I got to see first-hand the mechanisms of running a fashion week at a large-scale, networking with buyers, and getting inspiration from West-African designers for my next project. It was an excellent opportunity to network; I met fashion editors from Vogue New York; Vogue London and New York Times. I met fashion photographers and designers from all over the world.
Even though she has been successful in the region, she recognized that she still needed to do some work in terms of refining her pricing, ensuring the business has robust structures, with well-informed operational plans and leveraging on collaborations she has sourced through ResiliArt Accelerator.
After my experience in Lagos, I still talk to some buyers and designers I met there. For example, I got a gift from the Swap Shop, ran by Patrick Duffy (founder of the Global Fashion Exchange). He gave me a piece that I need to upcycle, and I am meant to document the process on my social media. Due to this collaboration, Ezreen Benissan, Editorial Associate at Vogue Business is also interested in doing an article about my upcycling journey. So, watch out for this on my social media page.
