Two pins gripped tightly between the teeth, a measuring yellow slung over the neck and a piece of paper and pencil in one hand, an ostensibly graying and bespectacled man in his mid-fifties moves to one of the multi-purpose sewing machines. This character, who has developed the Robert Molefhabangwe's trait of peeping over the spectacles when engaged in a conversation as a way of attracting attention or emphasizing a point, is Mohamed Bah, the owner and Managing Director of Supreme Fashion House, situated off Kenneth Kaunda, African Mall area. He has a complement of five trained citizen assistants.
Mohamed Bah, an accomplished fashion designer, fled his strife-torn native Sierra Leone for neighboring Nigeria in 1980, leaving his family behind, soon after qualifying for the Diploma in Fashion Designing from a government technical college. Prior to the successful completion his studies, he had lost both parents in fatal rod traffic accident at the age of 16. It was this catastrophe that compelled Bah to take this route as he had become the surviving members of the family breadwinner.
Bah said that he chose Nigeria as a host country where he could pursue his professional career as fashion designer because it was relatively peaceful at that time and nearer home. Because of what he had gone through in Sierra Leone, little did Bah know that less than two decades away, in 1997, he would find solace in Botswana to pursue his fashion designer career more vividly.
He revealed that cloth has been his passion since a very early age as fashion designing had been a family tradition handed from generation to generation. Bah, who considers fashion designing as a chore business area, explained, "most of my regular customers are reliable because they pay their bills at the time that they collect their orders. I have customers as far afield as Maun, Francistown and Lobatse. At the moment South Africa is our biggest export market and they buy all types of designer fashions ranging from African to Western attire. There is a niche market for customers who prefer imported material that ensure I have sufficient African material stock in order to meet demand.
"One has to do what is humanely possible to retain a regular clientele who will comprise a repeat business base to sustain the business before embarking onto ambitious projects to increase market share."
Bah, however, explained that "there is also scope to do the best in one's business to enhance curiosity sales for customers who make purchases for the first time. Once these are satisfied with the quality and design of the attire, they will also join the regular customer base. The location of the business less than a kilometer from the Mall Mail and on the eastern verge of White City suburb gives it a competitive edge in volume sales."
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