Burgeoning African fashion brand MIZIZI is bringing more diasporic flavor to the forefront of the culture with the official release of its 23’ sportswear campaign.
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With this new collection, MIZIZI founder and CEO Paakow Essandoh wanted to give his customer base something novel and refreshing to spot for the warmer seasons of the year.
“Our pieces are usually adorned with flags, heritage and symbolism, we wanted to create something simpler and more universal,” said Essandoh in a statement received by Blavity. “The Sportswear ‘23 hoodies and pants are a lot more understated and casual, yet still bold and unmistakably MIZIZI.”
For this particular collection, they’ve chosen to tap into MIZIZI’s signature black-and-yellow branding coupled with a series with sporty silhouettes for a more incisive and riveting look.
Stemming from what they saw as a lack of African pride and representation present in Florida, co-founders Paakow Essandoh and his friend George Kariuki (who later left the company for other business endeavors) recognized how Africans might be impacted by this deficit on a global scale.
After tremendous amounts of time and effort were put into brainstorming ideas that could be equally as marketable as it is brilliant, they came up with the term– MIZIZI, which means “roots” in Swahili.
Despite having a simple meaning, the name is emblematic of the type of connections the brand desires to foster everyday.
“Africa is the only continent whose children leave and never come back,” Essandoh told Blavity in a prior interview back in 2016. “With the lack of representation, we tend to lose touch with an entire dimension of our identity because we’re not exposed to it.”
Doubling down on his initial goals to change the game of African fashion, Essandoh is sticking to this promise with the advent of this new collection.
“It’s honestly becoming bigger than me and bigger than I expected,” he told us in 2016. “MIZIZI itself is becoming a movement, and it’s a blessing to be able to witness this growth.”
