About • Osei

ABOUT OSEI-DURO

Osei-Duro is a fashion brand headquartered in Ghana, with a studio in Vancouver, Canada and a distribution center in Colorado, USA. We design with handmade textile techniques to produce contemporary garments. We dye and sew everything we make in Ghana, contracting with small scale artisans and manufacturers. Yep, handmade and hand dyed everything. We work to support our local apparel industry in becoming increasingly sustainable, and by that we mean sustainable in the most basic sense: able to be upheld or maintained. Something that can sustain; can last.

QC Manager Kwaku Dabuo cuts fabric for batiking

OUR WORKPLACE

We believe in a work culture where everyone's input is valued. We strive towards clear communication, mutual respect and teamwork. There are nineteen of us in Accra, two in Vancouver, and one in Los Angeles, as well as the distribution team in Colorado. At Osei-Duro we pride ourselves on taking full time pay for a four-day work week. We enjoy 3 weeks annual paid leave, 90 days full pay maternity leave, two weeks full pay paternity leave, full health insurance coverage, pensions, and other statutory benefits.

Our headquarters in Accra are in a lively old house. The showroom space as you enter sees frequent visitors, and vendors are also often stopping in with drop offs and for meetings. Events and trainings are held in the outdoor dining space adjacent to our new nursery, as well as communal lunches and celebrations. Professional and personal improvement trainings are increasingly a focus at our Accra space. Recent afternoons have found us doing fire safety training in the parking lot, using our roof balcony for a yoga class, or having a photo shoot in the garden. We currently grow passionfruit, papayas, and watermelon at the office, as well as lemongrass and tomatoes. Our Accra HQ is the heart of our business, and it is where most of us come daily, but our satellite team members in Canada and the US are vital to our business model.

The pattermaking team: Vero Awomkawen, Martha Yurobo and Molly Keogh

The Quality Control team: John, Maxwell, Sandra, Kwaku, Peter and Kenny

Ghana Country Director Shoshana

Marketing Coordinator Ash and founder/designer Maryanne

HR and Internal Operations Director Rhoda

The Production Team: Ellen, Happy, Sandra and Mary

Domestic Associate Makafui

Logistics Manager Prince

Technical Manager Martha

Custodian Alfred

PRODUCTION

We work with a wide variety of small-scale artisans. Techniques we have worked with include hand batiking and tie dyeing, botanical dyeing such as natural indigo and onion skins, hand weaving and ikat, recycled brass casting (lost wax), hand crochet and machine knitting, silk-screening, quilting, embroidery, woodcarving, leather shoe making, glass bead making, patchwork, soft sculpture and performance. We have produced in Ghana, India, Peru, Canada and the United States. Over time, we have seen the greatest demand for our hand batiked dresses and jumpsuits, and that is where most of our production currently focuses. We do continue to experiment with new processes as often as possible and take pleasure in what we refer to as Special Projects. Osei-Duro’s focus in Accra is production, and our headquarters is, among many other things, the place where fabric and notions are distributed to dyers and sewers, and finished garments are packed for shipping. We are very hands on in our production, and our production team visits our contractors weekly to ensure quality and consistency. Dialogue around problem solving and improvements is constant; we’re a bit obsessed with communication. Our contractors set their prices, and we advocate for fair pricing and regularly review to adjust for Ghana’s inflation rates.

SPECIAL PROJECTS

Special Projects is the space where we explore, experiment, and play. It's where our work often intersects with others'. Below are are some of the Special Projects we have participated in.

RERUNS PROGRAM - The aim of our Reruns program is to provide job skills and training to women in recovery who live in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, while simultaneously closing the loop on our own textile waste. Participants are paid to repair, photograph and create online listings for returned items and production seconds. Each cohort then launches an online sale and then learns how to pack and ship the sold items, functionally receiving a complete training on running an online shop. The program is a partnership between Osei-Duro, The Union Gospel Mission, and the City of Vancouver and aims to provide a stepping stone in the continuum of employment, building on UGM’s Repair to Wear’s outstanding success.

Calm Water, Addoley Dzegede, 2020.

ARTIST RESIDENCY - The Osei-Duro Residency offers artists the opportunity to work in open-ended collaboration with Osei-Duro in Ghana. Projects may include but are not limited to music, movement, film, sculpture, writing, food, textiles, fashion, painting and printmaking. The residency can result in a collaborative product for sale or not. Since 2018 we have been hosting artists, both international and local, at our space in Accra. This project has generated talks, photoshoots, garments, soft sculptures, sound recordings, and any number of serendipitous connections.

COLLABORATIONS - We collaborate on limited edition pieces with artist and designers, as well as other brands. Past and current collaborators include Steloolive, Lululemon, Megan Whitmarsh, Wenlin Studios, Kenturah Davis, Nana Danso, Marie Colin-Madan, The Yumba Special School, Essence Hardin and Jihaari Terry, Dan Siney, Martin Peeves, Jim Drain, Lucy Greene, Better Basics, Sena Ahadji and many others.

Album Garment. photo: Francis Kokoroko

FOUNDING STORY

Molly Keogh and Maryanne Mathias, two white North American women, met in senior high school and reunited for an exploratory trip to Ghana in 2009. What started out as an open-ended experiment gradually grew into a thriving small fashion company, now firmly rooted in Ghana. With backgrounds in fashion and costume, as well as business and African studies, the two founders now function in a mostly advisory capacity to our large production/administrative team in Accra, as well as our small sales team in Vancouver. They also continue to lead our design team.

In the early years we were really making it up as we went along. We have made some questionable products, and also some great ones. We have had some thrilling and unexpected successes. The learning curve is intense, and we have learned almost everything by doing. We learned how to hire, and how to train. We developed our own intensive Quality Control system, really our own complete bespoke production system, step by step. We slowly expanded as a team. We scaled up to fill big orders, which involved many sleepless nights. We reinvented a lot of wheels. We have messed up, taken correction, and also self corrected. We have been saved often by our supportive friends with valuable advice, donated elbow grease, and sometimes money to loan. (Thank you friends. You know who you are.) And somehow we have survived. Somewhere around year eight or nine we looked up and realized that there were alot of us, and that we had created an ecosystem that is now supporting all of our lives :)

Osei-Duro started out as a small experimental dream, and somehow, we now find ourselves looking back across over a decade of design, growth, and livelihood. It’s been a wild ride, and while there were low points that we survived together, there are also many high points that we celebrate together.