Reni Folawiyo Quotes

My love and appreciation for beautiful things and my value for artisanal products and respect for artisanship.

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

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.

We are women. We are meant to rule the world. We are super.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 have a huge vision, huge passion and huge ambition.

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 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.

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 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.