2008 Tutu Fellow Elsie Kanza helped organise and stage the successful WEF Forum On Africa, which was held in Durban earlier this year. For fashion watchers, they'll have noted that the Senior Director and Head of Africa at WEF was wearing Kisua, founded by Sam Mensah, another Tutu 2014 Fellow and who is becoming a global fashion force. As colleagues from the same leadership cohort, Kanza not only looked the part, but was able to show off an outfit of his surrounded by heads of state and other African leaders. This kind of high visibility is not out of line for Mensah's brand, which has just launched a new Kisua shop in Menlyn Mall in Pretoria.
Mensah is also collaborating with Italian online retailer, Yoox. Yoox provides Kisua with another outlet onto the global stage, providing both visibility, but perhaps more importantly, distribution centres in most major international cities. The pieces are all being made in South Africa using African fabric. With Kisua’s growth since it began, it now is being distributed in South Africa, the US and the UK, while Yoox have even more capacity to dispense the products with an even bigger footprint in the global fashion scene.
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