IMADI Wicker Storage Basket
IMADI uses traditional materials and craftsmanship to create beautiful, trendy bags, baskets and rugs.
The main products of their workshop are the beautifully finished Senegal baskets, trimmed with leather. The weaving tradition is passed on from mother to daughter, and from grandmother to granddaughter, is renewed in the choice of their colors, shapes and textures.
"Our goal is to make great products, while making a difference in the lives of the people we work with."
Her name is Fatima Jobe and she trained as an architect. She left her native Gambia to attend the Glasgow Art School. With the economic crisis in Europe, she returned to Africa, this time to Senegal, a neighboring country, to work in architecture. Specializing in old buildings, she did not find much inspiration in Senegal where new construction is favored over conservation.
While working in an architectural firm, she took advantage of the weekends to experiment with making bags and baskets for herself. She has been making baskets for almost three years now with an incredible team of women and men.
She has fond memories of her grandmother using layu for preparing rice and her mother using a simple version of the colorful basket below to shop at the market.
The baskets were originally used to store grain. Now, its use has not only become more sophisticated, but its shape and design is also changing.
"My grandmother won't recognize the leather-trimmed beauties, which replaced her humble rice / grain holder."
Six women, directly employed by Fatima, carry out the weaving and the prototypes. They finalize all the samples before launching production in the villages. They work with more than one hundred and forty women in about twenty villages. Each village has its own basket shape specialty. For more complicated shapes, or those that have not yet been tried, it is always done in the workshop where all the experimentation takes place! The leather is added in the same workshop.
Being an architect and basing your life on measurements was rather frustrating and difficult to work with people who had no sense of measurements. From the start of the collaboration, she knew she wanted to sell more than baskets. It had to be more meaningful.
“I owed it to the girls and the next generation of the basketry community, who have never been to school to learn to read and write, to be able to evaluate their work and do their own bookkeeping, while providing them with , as well as to their families a source of income. "
