Osei-Duro

Osei-Duro grew out of a 2009 trip to Ghana by Maryanne Mathias and Molly Keogh, two North American designers who had known each other since high school. Mathias had trained in fashion design in Vancouver and already ran a small hand-dyed clothing line out of Montreal; Keogh held a fashion design degree from California College of the Arts and a master's in African Studies from Indiana University. What began as an open-ended experiment became a company formally founded in 2011.

The label's defining move was applying West African batik techniques to silk and rayon rather than the cotton batik is traditionally worked on, contracting small-scale Ghanaian artisans and manufacturers to hand-dye and sew every piece. Ghana was Mathias's first stop specifically because of its established cottage textile industry and room for it to grow.

Osei-Duro is headquartered and dyed in Accra, with a design studio in Vancouver, Canada, and a distribution center in Colorado. The founders describe economic and environmental sustainability as intrinsically linked, and source materials within Ghana where possible to cut transport impact while supporting local textile producers directly.