Seven years of African fashion e-commerce. Here's what we learned.
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We help premium, destination-led properties build boutique retail with a clear point of view — shaped around your guest profile, your design codes, and on-site realities. Grounded in Industrie Africa's relationships across the design ecosystem and years of cross-border retail execution.
Hospitality retail rooted in cultural intelligence, curatorial precision, and execution discipline — built to stand out and built to perform.
01
Tight, site-specific edits across fashion, lifestyle, and home — drawn from a vetted network of 100+ Africa-rooted designers, ateliers, and artisan studios.
02
Narrative, provenance, and place woven into product, merchandising, and staff language.
03
From buy plans to merchandising and staff training — your boutique operates seamlessly within the language of your property.
1
DISCOVERY & SCOPING
A first conversation to understand the property, the guest, and the commercial ambition. We come back with a recommended pathway and tier.
2
VISION & MOODBOARD
Creative and curatorial direction shaped to your design codes — what the boutique will feel like, what it will signal, and what it will do.
3
SOURCING & CURATION
A bespoke edit drawn from the IA+ network of designers, ateliers, and artisan studios across Africa — and selectively beyond, where the brief calls for it.
4
LAUNCH & MERCHANDISING
Retail setup, visual merchandising, and staff training — delivered as a working system your team owns from day one.
5
QUARTERLY REFRESH + RETAINER-LEVEL SUPPORT
Ongoing oversight: seasonal refreshes, performance reviews, and decision support to keep the boutique sharp over time.
Four levels of engagement. One standard. Start where you are, scale as you go.
Flagship Case Study
Bawe Island was a new build — the first private island resort of its kind in Zanzibar, opening without the retail heritage that established properties inherit over time. The boutique would be built from nothing, for a guest who had seen everything. That guest arrives fluent in global luxury. They know what a considered edit looks like, what a well-told provenance story sounds like, and what it feels like when a retail space is there to extract spend rather than extend an experience. The boutique had to earn their attention — not with recognizable names, but with an intelligence of selection that matched where they were: an island within an island, off the coast of one of the most culturally layered places in the Indian Ocean world. The brief, at its core, was a double obligation. Global in standard. Singular in place.
At a glance
Phase 01
Access
Guest profile analysis, on-site audit, spatial assessment. The output: a clear view of what the boutique had to do commercially, what it had to feel like for the guest, and what it would take to build it properly.
Phase 02
Design
Curation direction set across fashion, lifestyle, and home. 40+ designers, ateliers, and artisan studios selected from across Africa and beyond — a working assortment of 340+ options shaped to guest intent and seasonality.
Phase 03
Build
The team understood the property from the beginning, and what they built for Bawe Island reflects that. It sits beautifully inside the resort, it works well commercially, and it gives our guests something they cannot find elsewhere.
— Alex Azzola, Managing Director, Cocoon Collection
In less than a year, SoLA became the commercial proof of concept for IA+
400+
units sold in opening year
$220
average basket value
40+
designers and ateliers across Africa and beyond.
SoLA now informs IA+'s second hospitality engagement, opening in Stone Town in 2027.
A well-built edit becomes a tactile extension of the brand — story carried in object and place embedded in purchase.
Curated well, it lifts dwell time, basket size, guest satisfaction, and the perception that the property is intentional in every detail.
It's an opportunity to localise luxury, spotlight regional creative economies, and future-proof the guest experience.
03
A targeted facelift—strengthening the buy, merchandising, operations, and overall performance of your retail space
Best for
Properties whose boutique has room to grow — in coherence, performance, or both. A focused reset, not a rebuild.
Includes
04
Offers end-to-end retail transformation that aligns product, people, and place—maximizing cultural and commercial value
Best for
New builds, expansions, or full repositionings — where retail is being treated as a core brand layer from the start.
Includes
Sourcing executed, visual merchandising logic documented, storytelling framework written — provenance cards, staff language guides, in-store communication. Systems the team carries forward day to day.
Phase 04
Steward
Staff training, performance reviews, refresh cadence. IA+ remains engaged — reviewing sell-through, refining the edit, and protecting the standards quarter over quarter.
