Empowering African women,
one piece at a time.

How we started

Tari Designs started the way most independent African brands do — at a kitchen table, with one Shweshwe roll, a borrowed sewing machine, and a stubborn belief that African heritage prints deserved to live in modern wardrobes, not just heritage albums.

What began as a side project sewing pieces for friends and family quickly became something bigger: women messaging us asking for matching mother-and-daughter sets, requests from across the country, and orders that grew faster than we expected.

Why Shweshwe

Shweshwe is the printed cotton fabric most associated with Southern African women's heritage — bold, indigo-rooted, instantly recognisable. It carries hundreds of years of meaning, woven into weddings, ceremonies, and everyday moments.

Our work is to take that fabric and reframe it for modern life. A Shweshwe shirt that works under a blazer. A sweater your daughter will refuse to take off. A cushion that quietly anchors a living room.

Who makes Tari Designs

Every Tari Designs piece is designed and hand-finished in our small Cape Town studio. We work with a small team of South African seamstresses — most of them women, all of them paid fairly. We will never grow at a pace that compromises that.

Because we make in small batches, no two pieces are ever exactly the same. Print placement varies. Tiny irregularities exist. We see those as features, not flaws — they're the fingerprint of something handmade.

The Tari Designs woman

The Tari Designs woman dresses with intention. She wants her wardrobe to mean something. She wants to support African makers without sacrificing modern, well-cut design. She knows what she likes, and she doesn't apologise for it.

What's next

We're growing — slowly, deliberately. New collections drop seasonally. We're expanding into international shipping later in 2026. And every step we take is built on the same belief that started us: heritage and modernity belong in the same wardrobe.