Zainab Alayande is the founder and chief executive officer of ZeinnyCrafts, a Nigeria-based brand creating fashionable handmade leather cutting across shoes, bags, belts, wallets, leather jackets, and more.
Zainab Alayande is a graduate of Yabatech Polytechnic, where she studied Polymer Technology. She furthered her education at the University of Lagos (Unilag) to study Cell Biology and Genetics.
She was inspired to start up her fashion brand in a bid to become an authority in the fashion industry by creating innovative, stylish, comfortable masterpieces.
She adds, “the quest to change the narrative, to represent Nigeria, Africa, and the blacks at large on a global space in a unique and outstanding way, was also what inspired me.”
Responding to the question on how she acquired the skills. She says ‘’I acquired knowledge in a professional setting. Also, I enrolled myself in roadside shoemakers in order to gather adequate knowledge from the four walls of the classroom as well as the roadside.”
And today, I am a certified Shoemaker, she says. She started her business in 2016 from her savings to acquire some raw materials for production.
“I actually started small and grew big. Still growing,” she says.
Speaking on her achievement in the business amid competitors, she says, “every step we take is an achievement to us.’’
“Also, anywhere, anytime, our products are always standard. From pre-purchase to post-purchase, to product design, comfort you get to use, and satisfaction of our products.”
Everything about us speaks class and attention to detail, she adds.
Commenting on the impact of ZeinnyCrafts to society, the fashion CEO says that she has an extension of the brand ‘Zeinny Crafts Shoe School’ that educates and equips people with the right skills, making them useful for themselves and society at large.
“We started in 2019, and have trained over 200 students both within and outside the school premises.”
She says our brand has been able to mentor primary school children, secondary, undergraduates, graduates and even children that don’t have the opportunity to go to school.
“We engage in community services such as traffic control, giving back to society by visiting motherless baby’s homes, cerebral palsy individuals and the list goes on.” she adds.
Many businesses are prone to challenges, and ours is no exception, she notes, adding that some of the challenges that confronted the business ranges from lack of funds to poor power supply and finding the right employee among others.
However, the brand has devised a means to curb all this, although not perfected, but with time it will get better, Alayande explains.
Responding to how the journey has been so far, she says “we are just getting started, and we are yet to unleash a percent of our potential.”
Her advice to entrepreneurs is to keep on grinding, it’s never too late to start, find what works for you and push for it, there’s never a limit to what you can achieve in life.
“This is the right time to ‘’be a mechanic, when the time is right, you’ll be a baller,’’ she adds.
Taking us through her other routines, Alayande says she is an advocate for saying no to child molestation, a sports person, and an activist.
