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Reni Folawiyo

Nigerian entrepreneur

Reni Folawiyo is a Nigerian lawyer turned fashion entrepreneur and business woman.

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  • My love and appreciation for beautiful things and my value for artisanal products and respect for artisanship.
  • I am surrounded by beautiful products with great history culturally and was always inspired by our own version of Luxury. I felt we needed a platform that challenged us into making traditional luxury objects covetable by ourselves and the rest of the world. Also I looked around and saw that we have great taste and love of Luxury but not many people were investing in retail in a formal way. I am also aware that Luxury Retail is becoming very experiential and that creating our own unique version of luxury retail will be interesting educative and inspiring.
  • The exceptional beauty and versatility of Timber and the variety and abundance that we have here. Again the skills of the makers. For me honing those skills to produce simple streamlined and sophisticated designs is rewarding.
  • Brands I believe embody the spirit of today’s Africa in terms of aesthetic and culture, luxury and fashion brands that people know, love and aspire to own and exceptional African brands.
  • The luxury of having a purpose, identifying it and being able to realise it. It's rare, it's valuable and it's is covetable. That's Luxury
  • Alara was conceived to show the world who we are today, to share how we live and to show Africans that we have a lot to be proud of, that we create and enjoy objects of exceptional quality and beauty, to celebrate those who have done it, and to support and encourage those who wish to exchange, educate, elevate and beautify.
  • We will open people’s eyes to the incredible creative renaissance that is growing in Africa and how seamlessly it functions as a part of the global conversation of style.
  • Going beyond luxury retail, we’ve become a platform for exchange across all the creative disciplines. Our curation is trusted, and our network authentic.
  • I have a huge vision, huge passion and huge ambition.
  • We are women. We are meant to rule the world. We are super.
  • It’s about beautifully made, bright, colorful, expressive things that have a story behind them. It’s about art, clothing, and design that’s unique and beautiful. It’s African but contemporary
  • I decided it would be interesting to have the best stuff from all over the world along with the very best from Africa all in the same space to get people from outside Africa to see what was possible, but also to get people in Africa to understand the value of what they had. It was a bit of an education on both sides.
  • I used to spend a lot of time with artists and designers and I had a lot of friends that were doing creative things and I enjoyed spending time with them.
  • I got the impression that although people were making these things, they didn’t feel as though what they were making was good enough to be on a certain level. A lot of what people were doing hadn’t been properly celebrated and there were these very beautiful, very well-crafted African items that people didn’t know about.
  • I felt that we needed something iconic that would change our city, change the way we see ourselves and also change the way the world sees us.
  • I taught myself to make furniture and then started a furniture factory that still exists. But I realized I wanted to be around creative people. I started to travel within Africa, and discovered people making fashion and design pieces that were contemporary iterations of what you see traditionally—not what we would call contemporary in the Western sense, but in our context. And I thought that was very intriguing.
  • I understand the connection: female founders, a strong and unique point of view, curated and presented with a focus on art and its interaction with fashion. But our mission is different: upliftment.
  • We are selling our culture. We’ve clearly become an epicenter for cultural exchange for all kinds of creative people. In my native Yoruba language, alára means “wondrous performer, one who thrills endlessly”—that’s how we see African fashion and design, and how we want global audiences to experience it and embrace it.
  • ALÁRA was created to be a window to the world, an authentic curation of contemporary Africa...[it is also] a symbol of my personal journey of self affirmation and belief...a fulfillment of a burning desire to celebrate and elevate a lot of what I had come across on my journeys in Africa.
  • I think we needed a symbol of what is now called the African renaissance, a showpiece that is unapologetic in its approach about who we are today,...that we have people who make and consume luxury and that we have done it all by ourselves.
  • There’s a great appetite for consumption of luxury goods by Nigerians, but in terms of experiential retail with a concept...that is completely new...We have definitely had to educate the customer with regard to African Luxury, getting them to pay more for African goods that they have hitherto seen as craft and substandard.
  • It was important for us to have an aesthetic that we believed was our aesthetic...we chose designers who reflected the ideas of bold, unapologetic beauty, [had a] conscience and celebrated craftsmanship. We realised quite fast that people wanted to pay for brands they knew and coveted and if we were to succeed we had to first of all listen to our market, get them super comfortable with us and then start to explore other brands.
  • I devote a lot of time reading about and consuming the different art forms that we live with. I have tried to paint, I have made furniture, I have designed clothes, and I have always created experiences.
  • When I’m trying to define African luxury, and this is not an exclusive definition, it has to benefit the person who’s buying it in terms of its value, but it also must benefit the person who was making it and the people in that chain of making it.

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