Introducing Hekaya
An Exciting Journey
The brand was initially launched as Velvet in July 2019 and we’ve had a great journey so far! In just over a year we have grown our Instagram community to 16,000 followers, launched 150 items of clothing on our website and designed a clothing line with Hali Odour, a Content Creator in Kenya, which gained us national coverage in the Standard and Nation newspapers and an interview with KTN.
However, being a young business doesn't come without it’s lessons. Although there were several hurdles along the way, the biggest lesson for us was the importance of creating an authentic brand identity. This was made all the more paramount to us in 2020, as we were all thrust into a global pandemic, the likes of which none of us had experienced in our lifetimes.
As a brand it made us step back and think about our values and our vision and how we wanted to serve our community. We wanted to create not only a fashion brand, but a platform which celebrates and champions the beauty, strength and dreams of African women by telling a story through fashion, media and the power of community.
A New Name
Thus, Hekaya was born. Wanting to have a brand mark and not just a brand meaning meant for us a change in name. We wanted a name to resonate with our vision, which made us choose Hekaya, meaning fable in Swahili. We picked the name as a synonym for story, representing our new values.
Building a community
As a brand, our core values are celebration, togetherness, creativity and progress. We want to celebrate a vision of a fruitful, prosperous, strong, entrepreneurial and innovative people. We are pacemakers and community creators and believe African creativity can inspire a generation. We want our brand to represent all the strong women, the straight talkers and the go - getters.
To those who are proud of their heritage and their unique stories and want to share it with the world. It is you who represents the attitude that is at the core of Hekaya, where fashion not only celebrates the diversity of each woman, but represents the journey’s we are taking, the drive to make our mark on the world, and the courage to uplift and strengthen the communities we are from.
Our vision is to tell a story through fashion, media and the power of community that celebrates and champions the beauty, strength and dreams of African women. We see a generation of independent and empowered women rising above their challenges with the imagination and fortitude to create a future as bright as the African sun.
