Gatete, in love with leather.

Meet Gatete, our leather worker. He hand makes all our leather products.

The process is lengthy and time consuming, but the result is a quality bag that shows the beauty of what 'hand made' really means.

Meet our Akagera handbag.

New shop window: making off.

Books by hand

What do we do at mille collines when the power goes out?
make books by hand.

Very soon available in our stores.

The dyeing experience.

For our most recent runway collection we gave traditional kitengue fabric a new look by dyeing it dark muted colors. It was a successful endeavor, but as will all new collections, you then have the challenge of replicating these new ideas in order to get the product to stores.

This challenge led to a fun and tiring afternoon.

First step: organize and cut all the fabric to be dyed - no pot is big enough to hold all the fabric we needed to dye!

Step two: boil and stir. This left us all hot and thirsty, the fabric needs to boil for 20 minutes while you stir continuously, then lifting wet, steaming hot fabric out of the pots is no easy task.

Step Three: Get your buckets ready! Rinse rinse rinse until all the water runs clear. You need strong arms to twists out all the water.

Step Four: Hang the fabric to dry.

Final Step: Enjoy and big, cool glass of water, because you're finished!!

It was a successful day, and now we're ready to get the runway collection into stores!