“I was always the one who planned my first day of school attire two weeks in advance,” she explains. While attending Rutgers University, the South Orange, New Jersey native established a fashion blog in high school and interned at magazines such as Marie Claire and Women’s Wear Daily. During her final semester of college, she secured a job as a fashion assistant at V Magazine.

That same year, she visited South Africa, where she discovered indigenous apparel labels she’d never heard of before. When she returned, she discovered there was no way to get them out of the country. “I realized it wasn’t just a South African problem,” she says. “It’s a problem throughout Africa.” Several businesses lacked the technology, infrastructure, and connection to US shops needed to market their clothing beyond African borders.

Rasool eventually created The Folklore Group after the trip sowed the germ of an idea for a firm that would enable precisely that. It consists of a business-to-business platform that connects global retailers with developing market businesses from Africa, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean, a marketplace where consumers can find these goods and a newsroom that writes about them.

“We’re explicitly targeting companies that have been geographically or ethnically excluded from having this access to shops,” she explains. Rasool, now 27, earned $1.7 million in pre-seed funding alone in July 2021...


Read More... https://9jawatchtower.com/how-a-27-year-old-raised-over-1-million-to-set-up-a-platform-for-african-designers/

Inspiring indeed. She bridged a gap between supply and a big market.