Overview
Our innovative model puts sustainability front and center. Available in couture and rental collections, our mindfully-produced clothing is easy to care for and designed to be worn — and loved — for many years.
Handmade in Ghana and Italy, these special pieces connect women around the world.
About
Conscious Collections
We don’t design seasonal collections. Instead, each Maakola collection is a body of work developed around concepts and themes that we explore over time, developing new garments when we feel it’s appropriate. We drop new creations all year round. Our collections are available exclusively through our website and occasional pop-ups around the world.
We offer two ways to wear our collections. With Maakola For Rent, you can shine at any event with one of our beautiful pieces to hire, and then simply send it back when the party’s over. Maakola For Rent reinforces our commitment to sustainable fashion by making sure that every piece will be worn at least 30 times — one of the main goals of green carpet dressing.
The Maakola Couture Collection gives you the chance to own your favorite pieces, tailored to fit you perfectly. It’s the investment you make when you find something you love, and look forward to wearing it time and time again.
Sustainable Style
Our innovative model puts sustainability front and center. Every piece in the Maakola collection is made to order, so that we avoid creating unnecessary waste — we’re not in the business of producing clothes that nobody will wear. We are also committed to working with natural fibers that are both durable and easy to care for (our clothing is made from machine washable cotton to reduce your exposure to dry cleaning chemicals), as well as being easy to recycle. When you order one of these special pieces, you know that you’ll be wearing it for years to come.
Collective Progress
At Maakola we want to show the economic, environmental and cultural changes that are taking place — changes being driven by women around the world. We are mindful of our responsibilities towards the environment we live in, our friends, daughters, and future generations. We work to make sure that nobody is ever enslaved for the sake of your style. Fully transparent, we work closely with our tailors to produce our pieces ethically so that our customers can consume them consciously. In this way, we hope to generate financial, social, and environmental abundance. We are all in this together, creating a collective mindset that we hope will go on to touch many other industries and lives.
A Hundred Years of Heritage.
The name Maakola comes from Makola market in Accra, Ghana — the largest market in West Africa. The Makola saleswomen traded in Dutch wax print fabric, giving each pattern a name and a story that wove them into African life and culture. In doing so, they created an entire industry. Since the inception of Maakola, it has been clear to us that we owe our existence to these women from a century ago, and the hundreds of women who followed: to our tailors, to Maakola’s team members and ambassadors, and finally to our customers.
Sustainability
SUSTAINABILITY: a matter of design, materials, and demand.
At Maakola we ask ourselves every day, “how do the design, the fabric, the production, and the consumption of our products impact not only ourselves but also the world around us?”
We decided to create a fashion brand based on the values that make us feel good and believe that we are only at the beginning of a journey to provide innovative products and services while increasing their positive impact. Our contribution is grounded in the creativite, employment, environmental, entrepreneuristic, and profitable impact that fashion can have.
Our primary focus is on sustainability, which can be achieved with our commitment to bring responsibility and transparency to the value chain while enabling the consumer conscious consumption. We support Sustainable Development Goal 12, which promotes the sustainable consumption and production of consumables. In addition, we are energy efficient and utilize materials strategically to minimize the environmental and social costs as well as to reduce poverty.
For us, this is a serious matter, so we would like to share the statistics that dictate our choices.
The fashion industry is the second greatest consumer of water and is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions. These emissions account for more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. Part of these emissions come from pumping water to irrigate crops like cotton, oil-based pesticides, machinery for harvesting, and emissions from transport. The garment industry is responsible for 24 % of insecticides and 11% of pesticides. In the face of growing environmental threats, we need to radically change our consumption and production systems.
The number of unsold products that get destroyed can’t be quantified due to the secretive nature of the fashion industry. To give you a better understanding, global fashion production is now exceeding 100 billion garments a year, and brands like Burberry, who in 2018 burned almost $40m of stock or the $4.3 billion of unsold inventory, are negligent in caring about our environment. These larger commercial producers can reduce prices because of their greater stock levels. What if instead, we produce only what we consume and make sure that our clothes are uniquely designed to fit perfectly so we pay for the exact value they bring.
The majority of garment workers are underpaid. Bangladesh alone accounts for over three million of these workers, 85% of whom are women, who make between $30 and $40 a month – far below a living wage. 80% of them work more than 12 and 14 hours a day, and three-quarters of the female workers have been verbally abused at work while half have been beaten. Why do these workers need to pay with their life for our fashion choices? Is their life worth less than ours?
These concerns have been raised and the fashion industry has been slowly changing but remains a business that maximizes profits through minimizing costs. Thus, labour and the environment are treated as one of those collateral damages. At Maakola, we choose to decouple economic growth from natural resources and labour to create sustainable development and responsible business practices.
DESIGN
For us, sustainability starts with the design choices we make to affect consumer behaviors and the use of raw materials. When you purchase from us, we collect your measurements and work with our tailors to sew it for you, exactly how you like it. In this way, we avoid piles of inventory sitting around the world and enable sustainable consumption by producing only what our customers want. The end result is reduced levels of overstock and an increased reliance on small-batch production cycles. Not to mention happy customers.
MATERIALS
At Maakola, we don’t have control over the production of the fabric itself but we select 100% cotton fabrics, which allow our customers to wash them at home using warm water instead of sending them to a dry cleaning service. Avoiding dry cleaning means that our customers reduce their likelihood of being exposed to perchloroethylene.
The dry cleaning process releases small amounts of perchloroethylene into the air. Perchloroethylene is a volatile organic compound (VOC), a manufactured chemical that is primarily used for dry cleaning fabrics and degreasing metals. It has also been used to make other chemicals as well, including chlorofluorocarbons and rubber coatings; as an insulating fluid and cooling gas in electrical transformers; and as a scouring, sizing, and desizing agent in textiles.
We make long life-cycle pieces that can be worn for years and that will still remain beautiful because they are made with superior materials that can guarantee a much longer life span. We have personally tested our creations and after more than 20 washes they are still in remarkable condition. When a garment reaches the end of its life, they can be easily recycled because they are made of 100% natural fibers, while polyester fibers take more than 200 years to decompose.
DEMAND
Each Maakola’s piece is customized and made-to-order. Our model is a demand-based one and we don’t work with retailers so that our production is as close as possible to the desired order. To maintain this agility, in contrast to economies of scale, we use deadstock fabrics so that we can release often, new, limited products and customize garments based on the needs of our customers.
Creating a campaign wardrobe for Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was my Empire State of Mind moment.
Read moreThe Founder
Founder
Aurora Chiste is a serial social entrepreneur who has focused on achieving global sustainability through innovation and empowerment, as well as the founder of Ray Power Africa and Maakola, using solar power to make energy accessible and affordable, and fashion to shine a spotlight on female fortitude through a modern concept of luxury.