Sew For Life Industries

My name is Kipkosgei Magut, Nashville resident, serial entrepreneur, avid runner, Kenyan native, and founder of Sew For Life Industries. In 2006 I obtained a full-ride scholarship track and cross-country scholarship to go to Belmont University, a small private school in Nashville, TN. At Belmont, I double majored in Accounting and Information Systems. Since then, I have worked for over six years in the accounting industry and started a cumulative of six companies and initiatives that have gone to provide jobs or paths for people to make a better living. 

Due to the "race to the bottom" (search for ever-low labor) style of economics used by fast fashion brands, many garment industry workers earn less than a living wage. 

 In Kenya, apparel companies realized a growth rate of 14.7% and saw sales of US $174 million in 2019; some of the apparel produced went to discount stores such as Walmart and Dollar General. 

As wages in emerging markets rise, many African countries will be the next frontier to fast fashion. We are hoping to help slow this movement.
 
We hope to pay our tailors at the very least a living wage and make quality, custom-designed, and bespoke clothing inspired by African style. We will pair our customers with stylists, designers, and tailors through our web application and ensure that whatever they order, fit their lifestyle, is made to last, and has a low impact on the environment.

60-75 million people worldwide work in the apparel industry, and about 85% are women, as per The Circle report. Unfortunately, many of these workers don't get paid a living wage—a wage to sustain food, clothing, rent, healthcare, education, transportation, and savings.

In Kenya, where we will launch our initiative, there are about 20 - 30 thousand tailors across the country. Of these, we've signed up 130 tailors that are interested in our project, some of whom have participated in our mask-making effort. 

The stories we've gathered from Kenyan tailors, even though slightly different from those in emerging markets, still have the same theme: persistent abuse and under-compensation. They have produced products for businesses and governments and never gotten paid, or they have been hired and never gotten fairly compensated. 

As fast fashion comes knocking in search of cheap labor, I am afraid the problem will only get worse.  

Sew For Life Industries helps bring custom and bespoke African fashion to the mainstream while providing better wages to tailors. Here are the five steps involved with our project:

1. Our web application will assign our customer to a stylist who will meet them at their place of choice and take measurements.
2. Once done collecting customers' sizes, we will assign them to available tailor and charge their credit card.
3. All the designs will be cut and shipped to the tailor by our lead designers.
4. The tailor will make clothing as per designers' specifications and ship to our distribution center.
5. Once the product is at the distribution center, we will process payment to the tailor.
6. From the distribution center, we will ship to the address provided by our tailor or bundle them based on the orders we have per location. 

Kenya is home to about 20-30 thousand tailors, 85% of whom are women. Our first product targets specifically this market. Since we launched our mask-making campaign two months ago and started signing up tailors, we've learned firsthand the challenges they have to endure every day. 

For many of the tailors, most of their work came from making school uniforms and wedding clothing; for that reason, COVID-19 shut down has affected their bottom line significantly, and they are hoping to diversify where the orders come from post-COVID-19.

Additionally, as we ran our mask-making project, we learned that the Kenyan government and some businesses had placed orders with a group of tailors and never got compensated. We hope that our project will be a reliable platform that they could accept orders on and be guaranteed payment as long as the work is done according to specification and on time.  

Three months ago, I was on a WhatsApp chat with a group of Kenyans, from that chat group, I learned how much need there was for masks in Kenya. After my conversation, I reached out to Ash Rogers, Executive Director of Lwala Community Alliance, a non-profit that runs a clinic in Migori, Kenya to get a professional perspective.

I learned from Ash that there would be community spread, and models showed that approximately 100,000 Kenyans would be infected. Additionally, I learned that Ash was working on sourcing masks for their front-line workers at their clinic and it was taking a while for the masks to be delivered.

From then on, I started reaching out to partners to see if they would participate in a mask-making campaign. Since our launch in May 2020, we've partnered with seven companies, raised about $5,000, hired 18 tailors, and signed about 130 tailors interested in working with us in any capacity.

All these, coupled with my knowledge of lack quality African style fashion in America, it made sense to explore the possibilities of building a platform to provide better pay to African tailors and bring quality, custom, and bespoke African style to the world. 

Having grown-up at a rural community in western Kenya, at a family with low income, I, unfortunately, understand how far-reaching the consequences of not having a living wage can be on a family.

Because my parents—both of whom never made to high school—had no opportunities to support all of our basic needs, unfortunately, on occasion, some things had to wait. 

That meant going to school with patched clothing for my siblings and me, missing school for months in a row for lack of school fees, or living in a leaky roof. We just had to make do.

Knowing how much money many fast fashion industries make, I think it's just a basic necessity that they should pay a living wage to their tailors. Unfortunately, based on the reports I've read, it doesn't look like things are moving fast enough, and I firmly believe that we don't have time for one more person to get hurt. That's why I am pursuing Sew For Life Industries to help make things better.

Two years after graduating from college, I founded Tribendurance, a nutrition bar company making high nutrient energy bars made out of Moringa leaves, an extract from the Moringa tree, a plant native to Africa and Asia. Within three years, I got Tribendurance nutrition bars into 60 stores, including Whole Foods, Amazon, and Kroger. 

As the CEO, I managed all operations, including nutrition bar formulation, business modeling, costing, marketing, hiring, and distributions. My manufacturing experience at Tribendurance will come in handy at Sew For Life Industries. 

Additionally, over the last two years, I have managed three software developers that have helped build software that enables businesses to capture and verify names, EINs, SSNs, physical addresses, and bank account information of vendors and independent contractors. My ability to successfully manage this project will prove useful for Sew For Life Industries.

Towards the end of May, we talked to a non-profit in Nashville for about two weeks about the possibility of them being a fiduciary for our fundraising campaign on the GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign. Everything seemed to be going well until a few days before the launch of our event, and then the organization pulled out because our mask-making initiative didn't align well. That meant we had a few days to find another partner; I remember I spent a whole day cold calling/emailing various potentials. Our persistence bore fruits, and we landed another local partner who has worked with us over the last two months. 

In 2019, I led two Nashville entrepreneurs and one industry leader in the founding of Twende, a Kiswahili word for "let's go. Twende is a movement to change the success rate for Black and brown founders in their crucial first three years of their startups. 

The idea came from my own experiences as a black entrepreneur and the stories I heard from Nashville's black and brown entrepreneurs. Today Twende is housed at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, a co-working space for entrepreneurs in Nashville. In 2019, Twende accepted 17 black and brown entrepreneurs for its educational program. These folks will end up changing Nashville for the better—this happened because I decided to listen to my gut. Here is the link to the program: https://www.ec.co/twende 

African 

Today: We have provided jobs to 18 tailors through our mask making  and compaign and signed up about 130 tailors that are interested in working with us on whatever capacity.

1-Year: We are hoping that we can provide jobs to all the 180 tailors we've signed up within the next year.

5 Years: Given how quickly we were able to signup the 130 tailors, we know that if we can successfully provide work leads to the tailors, we can easily server up 85% of the Kenyan tailors within 5 years.