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  • A small public service announcement along with today's inspiration photo! ⁠ .⁠ As you know Blueprint Africa offers a number of services including PR and brand promotion, renovations and interiors photography. However, what originally got us in business was sourcing home decor and craft from across our network of partners in multiple African countries. We love talking to you all about your sourcing needs and are always excited to take on the otherwise frustrating task of logistics in Africa.⁠ .⁠ However, we thought we would share a few tips on how to approach us for this service:⁠ ⁠ *Please greet us in our DMs people! We are not chatbots, we are humans 😊⁠ .⁠ * Be sure to check our catalog of products we can readily source quickly on www.blueprintafrica.com FIRST. ⁠ .⁠ * If the brands we represent do not offer what you are looking for, kindly email us your sourcing needs (rather than supplying us photos in the DMs). ⁠ . ⁠ * Have your sourcing needs organized preferably with SKUs, quantities and photos in a table or spreadsheet so the ask is clear.⁠ .⁠ * Be prepared to compensate us for the time it will take to identify the producers and round up all your products which sometimes need to be sourced from multiple African countries (yes, they are all baskets but some are from Ghana vs. Rwanda vs. Zimbabwe vs. Senegal vs. Morocco!).⁠ .⁠ * Know that with borders closed shipping costs are 2x the normal price and it may take longer to get to you than usual so a bit of patience may be required. ⁠ .⁠ Got any other questions about sourcing home decor wholesale from artisans on the continent (or tips from your experiences)? Let's share please!⁠ ⁠ ⁠
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  • I registered for a webinar today by 1:54 Contemporary Art Fair today entitled "The Day After: How Contemporary African Galleries are Envisioning Post Covid-19 Art World?". I have personally been to two of the three speakers' galleries. Living in Abidjan, I enjoy very much the white box Cécile Fakhoury gallery and through my girl Eva Sonaike, I got to visit Ayo Adeyinka's Tafeta gallery the last time I was in London. This work was featured by Tafeta at a June 2019 exhibition of Niyi Olagunju (Baga Nimba series) and I have been dumbstruck by it since.⁠ ⁠ .Generally I miss my art gallery walkabouts and having recently launched some art agency services at Blueprint Africa, I am curious as to what the experts have to say. I am not entirely for this push to full digitization for example. So, so, so much is lost in photos and virtual tours. Art often has emotive texture that is foregone, the color story gets muddled, you get different feelings looking at it from different perspectives. You have to interact with art physically to really imbibe it IMO. What do you think?
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  • Pillow Talk: There is a running school of thought that throw pillows are absolutely and total useless. That they just bring about clutter and the entire concept is archaic. The history of cushions which I looked up because I am a geek is kind of interesting. Apparently, the first pillows (made of stone mind you) showed up in 7,000 BC in early Mesopotamia to cradle mummies heads into the afterlife. The explosion of pillow love came with the industrial revolution in Europe and the growth in production of textiles for the upper class of the British Empire looking to showcase their riches with...yes an abundance of ornate, decorative fabrics stuffed with feathers flung to and fro. But in this year of our Lord 2020, in the era of Marie Kondo and pairing down, in the era where a single pillow is $25 to $90, showed we just move on? Are you Team #PIllowHoarder or Team #SayNotothePillow.
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  • Good morning all! I would like to introduce you to Nathalie Djakou Kassi (@djakoukassi) a Cameroonian ceramicist living in Nigeria whose ceramic platters and vessels I recently fell in love with. The illusive yet repetitive facial expressions embedded in her work give rise to a sense of movement and texture. According to one of her representative galleries @SMOcontemporary her work is inspired by nature and man's volatile interaction with his environment. Nathalie won the first Africa Prize at the International Fair of Ouagadougou (SIAO) in 2012 and ha sbeen an active member of the Lagosian art scene since 2015.
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  • So this is one of those posts where the picture (which I love) has nothing to do with the caption. Bear with me. ⁠ .⁠ I recently watched a live with Ghanaian influencer @hayet.rida about her journey as a blogger. She was giving us a LOT of good tips. Someone asked "how do we get more engagement" and she said "well are you engaging with your audience?" She said we should not be looking to build a 'look and see' type of community but we should talk to each other, like talk-talk. Although it was such a small comment, I was still thinking about it a few days later and decided to actually go look at all 8,000 of y'all to see who EXACTLY is out there (although many of you have private accounts...sneaky lol 👀). Normally I just respond and react to comments here under photos or in my DMs but never thought to actually go to my followers and scroll through and get to know you all a bit better. ⁠ .⁠ .⁠ And you know what? I followed some folks back, left some comments on photos I thought were cool and even REMOVED some bots and other dormant accounts (you know, the ones with no profile photo, or the ones that have 1 post and are following 4,000 people?) I know there are social media tools for that sort of thing but I decided to spend time doing it manually... a few profiles every time I had a few moments over the last few days. ⁠ .⁠ .⁠ Have you ever done a follower audit? Do you care who is following you? Well I do and I am glad you all survived the purge. Hugs!) 😀😋
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  • Can we have a candid discussion for a second? Between us, what exactly is the immense appeal of Bamileke "Juju" hats? Like there are so, so, so, so many beautiful African artifacts descending from our culture, way of life and particularly festivals and royal events but this one item is almost now synonymous with African design. I am more and more interested in what makes some elements of African decor 'mainstreamable' and others not. Like who is the first person who saw this on the head of Cameroonian traditional dancer and said "Aha! this belongs on a wall"! Does it lend itself well to industrial design more than other crafts? Can we talk about how this managed to go viral in the design world while much of the rest of Africa's design is disregarded? How do we replicate the success of the juju hat to other furniture and decor from the continent? (Or should we even try?) Your thoughts welcome.
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