“My car always smells of goat — I hope it doesn’t smell like goat today.”
Haowa Bello has good reason to have a fragrant car. The Nigerian goat farmer and accessories designer often uses her vehicle to deliver livestock to her customers.
“I want them to see me,” she argues. “I want them to feel they’re getting a personal experience.”
It’s a world away from New York, London and Berlin, but that’s where some of Bello’s goat skin leather ends up — as Madame Coquette bags on boutique shelves in some of the world’s most fashionable cities.
Bello’s business has come a long way. The designer started off with a $200 loan from her sister in the mid-2000s. With the money in her back pocket she set off for a market to track down an artisan to make her first design.
“I had no idea who was going to make the bag. I had no idea what went into [making a] bag,” she explains. She didn’t even have an illustration of what she wanted to make.
“I didn’t know how to draw. I always hated art,” she says, “I felt I wasn’t artistic enough.” But Bello was able to collaborate with skills craftspeople, whom she says, eventually they used to her “crazy ways”.
In 2008, her first bags were sold and a grant of $25,000 from the Nigerian government allowed Bello to acquire livestock and grow her business.
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