The Folklore Group Just Raised $1.7M to Launch Premier Wholesale Platform for African Designers
The Folklore Group is undertaking a new effort to ensure retailers know exactly where to find and buy products from African and diasporic brands, which many have pledged to carry on their store shelves.
And it has just secured $1.7 million in pre-seed funding to do it.
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Once solely The Folklore, which launched in 2018 as an e-commerce site featuring luxury and emerging designers from Africa and the diaspora, founder and chief executive officer Amira Rasool is now parlaying her market access into an expanded group of business-to-business, consumer and media offerings with a conglomerate called The Folklore Group.
Rasool claims the leading arm of the business, The Folklore Connect, which launched Thursday, is the first b-to-b wholesale e-commerce platform that will allow global retailers to easily and effectively diversify their product mix — and to make good on commitments they’ve made since 2020.
“I recognized post-George Floyd that these retailers were really in a place where they didn’t even know how to diversify their product offering in terms of including Black-owned brands into their product mix and it’s because no one’s really tried to solve that problem before,” Rasool told WWD. “We recognized that this was the moment that we should move to the next phase of the business. The wholesale e-commerce platform will help these retailers keep those promises that they made, keep those pledges that they made. We basically wanted to eliminate any excuse as to why retailers can’t continue to bring in great product from around the world without having to sacrifice how they already run their business.”
The Folklore Connect will be membership-based, meaning retailers must apply to participate, though once accepted there will be no cost for use of the platform. The aim, Rasool said, is to empower retailers “to easily discover and shop these brands in the manner that they typically do with the Western brands that they stock.”
To start, the platform, which is in its beta phase, will feature 10 brands The Folklore Group has already worked with — including Rich Mnisi and Suki Suki Naturals — as well as 10 retailers that have a history of working with Black-owned or African brands. This summer, applications will be open to a wider audience of interested participants.
With boots on the ground, The Folklore Group discovers and vets brands for inclusion on Connect, locating and examining the product themselves or through trusted partners, consulting with those that have worked with the brands before and determining their capabilities to be able to deliver on generated demand. The platform will retain a free option for brands to use, though a tiered pricing offering later this year will allow access to additional features and support.
“Not everybody has the opportunity to go to South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and so we are that for them. We want to make sure that we know that the brand has the capacity to fulfill these orders, that the product is great, how it performs in the stores that they already work with, and having that assurance is something I think is important for retailers, especially in this digital age where they can’t enter these showrooms like they used to,” Rasool said. “So it’s going to be curated, it’s going to be exclusive and we’re also vetting the retailers as well on behalf of the brands so that we’re getting brands and retailers that both have a similar customer base, that both have a similar mission and just making sure that they align.”
Courtesy of The Folklore Group
The $1.7 million pre-seed funding round, led by Slauson & Co. with participation from Fearless Fund (which invests in women of color-led businesses) and Black investors like WNBA star Nneka Ogwumike, puts Rasool in a position to expand other offerings — and, at age 26, also makes her one of the youngest Black women to raise that much for a fashion and lifestyle brand in a pre-seed round.
“It means a lot because, to me, this is money for the community,” she said. “The money that was invested, we’re investing directly back into our community and the designers that we work with, being able to fund building this technology and having a great team that can work with these brands, empower them, get them the resources, the financial support that they need. And even in terms of who we partner with on photography, who we partner with as writers, a lot of times, if you walk into one of our sets, the photographer, stylist, everyone’s Black. I’m really intentional about that because the whole aim of The Folklore from the beginning was how to economically empower people from Africa and the diaspora. So an investment in us is really an investment in our community. It’s an investment in economic opportunities, it’s an investment in job creation, exports out of Africa and that’s what really excites me.”
That investment will see what was formerly the group’s e-commerce retail arm — which will now be called The Folklore Marketplace — become a shopping aggregate, similar to Lyst or ShopStyle, but with much more Black-owned brands than can typically be found on those discovery platforms.
“This is just another incentive for the retailers that join Connect because we’re able to continue to gather data around how customers interact and engage with these brands as well as the products,” Rasool said. “[We’ll be] able to eventually use that data that we’re collecting on the consumer side to be able to help retailers make smarter decisions in terms of their buy [and] help brands make smarter decisions in terms of what they’re producing.”
The third arm of The Folklore Group, The Folkore Edit, will feature interviews, business news and industry analysis, functioning as a “source for anything about African and diasporic design and fashion, beauty, home, accessories,” Rasool said.
The aim is to continue to grow the group from here.
“We are looking at this as a company that will continue to expand our product offering, all of that just being in line with being able to increase diversity in the industry, being able to make an economic impact amongst Africa and the diaspora and increase employment,” Rasool said. “This is just the beginning, the Folklore Group phase one. We have a lot of exciting things [ahead] and we have a lot of plans to scale.
“You have the LVMHs, the Kerings the Yoox Net-a-porter Group, and now there’s The Folklore Group. And we’re going to shake things up a little bit.”
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