Colour with a Conscience to #doDifferent
We all know that feeling when you find an accessory that just works - a bag with the perfect mix of colour and craft, a print so vibrant it stops people in the street, a piece that feels like it has a story woven right into the stitching. Now imagine that the very same bag is also paying a fair wage to a woman in Khayelitsha, funding her business training, and keeping her close to her own family instead of on a two-hour commute. That's not wishful thinking. That's Township®.
Enter Township, a Cape Town-born fair trade fashion label with township colour running through everything it makes. They're not just designing beautiful bags - they're weaving dignity, opportunity, and independence into the very seams of what they do.
Every great South African story starts with a chance encounter. Township's began in 1987, when a young Air France executive named Nicole-Marie Iresch travelled from Paris to Cape Town on holiday. Walking through the city, she was approached by a group of women asking for work. They had basic sewing skills but nowhere to use them. Nicole-Marie followed them home to Khayelitsha, and what she found there changed the course of her life.
Ten years later, in 1997, Nicole-Marie relocated to South Africa permanently and founded Township® - a social enterprise built entirely around one idea: that the creativity and resilience she'd witnessed in the townships deserved a global stage, and the women behind it deserved real, sustainable income.
Fast-forward to today, and Township has grown from a single conversation on a Cape Town street into a network of independent, women-run sewing co-operatives supplying fair trade bags and accessories to customers across South Africa, Europe, the USA, and beyond. But here's what's remarkable: the foundational idea has never changed. Every bag is still handmade by township women, in their own communities, on their own terms.
What makes Township genuinely unusual isn't just what it sells - it's how it hands over ownership. Through its non-profit arm, Afrique du Sud, Bidonvilles (ASB), Township doesn't simply employ women; it builds them their own businesses. Each co-operative receives intensive training in sewing, accounting, and business management, and after six months, it becomes an autonomous entity, registered in its own right with South Africa's Department of Trade and Industry.
Today that network includes cooperatives operating in Khayelitsha and Manenberg on the Cape Flats, employing dozens of women directly - and, because each job in a township community tends to support an entire household, positively affecting somewhere between seven and ten people for every single job created. The women work close to home, in safe, professional spaces, saving the time and money they would otherwise lose to long commutes across the city.
Township wasn't content to simply say it was ethical - it went and proved it. It became the first South African fashion brand to join the World Fair Trade Organization, the global body that certifies genuine fair trade practice from sourcing right through to the finished product. Materials are ethically sourced, largely eco-friendly cotton and recycled PET from plastic bottles, and every product - from high-end fashion pieces to Pick n Pay's eco-shopper range to custom conference bags for major corporate events - is still handmade by the same co-operative network.
It's not a marketing label stitched on for effect. It's a standard the business has held itself to for close to three decades.
Township's now-iconic prints didn't come from a design studio - they came from the townships themselves. In the early 1990s, Nicole-Marie began photographing the homes, fabrics, and everyday creativity of the women she worked with, building a photographic archive that would eventually inspire an entire collection of original prints.
Those prints now appear across Township's full range of bags, scarves, hats, and accessories for men, women, and kids - each one, in its own small way, carrying a piece of Khayelitsha and Manenberg out into the world.
One of Township's most powerful ranges pays direct tribute to the community it comes from. The Enka bag collection is named for Enkanini - the biggest informal settlement in Khayelitsha, home to more than 60,000 people. Each bag is printed with the municipality code and stand numbers of the settlement, a quiet nod to the residents who, faced with the constant threat of forced removals, have defied evictions time and again by protesting or forming human shields around their homes. It's a collection built as a tribute to their perseverance - proof that Township's storytelling runs as deep as its supply chain.
Township's impact isn't an abstract "empowerment" claim - it shows up in the order books. At its peak, the network has supported around seven sewing co-operatives producing roughly 250,000 bags a year, with more than half of that production exported to Europe, the USA, and beyond. Every one of those bags represents paid, fairly-traded work for a woman who chose to build a business rather than simply take a job.
And it isn't only Township's own label that benefits. Through its B2B arm, the same co-operatives produce corporate gifts, delegate bags, and conference merchandise for professional conference organisers, corporations, and NGOs looking for a local, fair trade alternative to mass-produced imports - meaning every branded tote handed out at a conference can quietly be doing the same work as every bag sold in-store.
What began as one Parisian holidaymaker following a group of women home to Khayelitsha has become one of South Africa's longest-running fair trade fashion enterprises - a business that has spent almost three decades proving that a bag can be beautiful, commercially successful, and built entirely around handing economic power back to the women who make it.
By choosing a Township® bag - whether it's a statement Enka tote, a corporate conference bag, or an eco-friendly shopper - you're putting money directly into a Cape Flats sewing co-operative, run by the woman who made your bag, for as long as she chooses to run it.
Together, let's choose differently. Let's carry things that were made with purpose, by hands that had a real stake in the outcome. Because a fashion industry where township women own the means of their own success is absolutely the industry we want to see more of.
