Crafting hand-made, bespoke shoes from the finest linen, silk and Swarovski crystals, Mona Matthews has set a new standard in Nigeria’s fashion industry. Mona Mathews has become one of Nigeria’s most respected brands. Meet Abimbola Azeh as she shares her incredible journey.
Abimbola Azeh; First of all I studied Law and I, sort of felt tied foot as a lawyer because I always felt that there was a creative part of me, that wasn’t being expressed.
Abimbola Azeh; What this job does for me is that it gives me the opportunity to express my creativity and I really enjoy what I do. Most of the designs are my designs, but I work with a group of shoe makers who are extremely talented because all our shoes are handmade. The shoes are made by individual shoemakers in their workshops. When the shoes are finished, they bring them back into the boutique, and here we add, you know like the final finishing touches. I work essentially with leather. Leather is a skin, it’s like your skin and it breathes, it expands and contracts, to suit your feet as it were, so most comfortable material that you can have on your feet. I also work with ornaments and stones. I use different things to add value to the shoes that I create and design.
Abimbola Azeh; One of the things that makes my work really enjoyable is the fact that you can come up with a concept, you know, in your mind, work with people and bring it, you know, and bring it to pass, you bring it, it comes out of you. That’s really interesting.
Abimbola Azeh; The African fashion scene, is is sort of different from the international fashion scene. So what I do to keep up and to even sometimes be ahead is, I look, I go online, I read fashion magazines, I try and see what the fashion forecast is for the year or for the season and then I look at what clothes we’re wearing in Africa, and I put the ideas together, and come up with concepts that I think will be relevant to the season that we are about to go into.
Abimbola Azeh; My work benefits our society in several ways. One, it creates employment for young creative people can, who are prepared to work with their hands, who are prepared to learn, who are prepared to upgrade themselves, also it’s an inspiration. I like to see it as an inspiration for young, creative people who have a dream, to to put together, the kind of outfit that Mona Mathews has become. Ehm, when I started I didn’t have any money I didn’t have any capital, I just started with one shoemaker, and one customer, I took the order, I took the deposit, we got the leather and we put the shoes together.
Abimbola Azeh; When I started, my initial challenge was getting the right work men, and I found out that, they didn’t really exists in the sense that, they weren’t people who were readily as skilful and as trained as I want them to be, so I looked for the best people who had already been working for, so many years and they were skilful at what they were doing and then I started working with them, and giving them my own specifications, and sort of like in an informal way training them to become Abimbola Azeh; what I wanted them to be. The same thing with the materials; we had problems getting, the kind of trendy heels, and trendy ornaments that we wanted for our shoes, so we worked with leather and create motives. We work with fabric and create motives, we learnt how to work with crystals. I just found that, that made my shoes more unique, more different and more interesting. The other challenges that we faced was, getting people to accept that made in Nigeria products were good, but I found out that, what Nigerians want, is quality.
Abimbola Azeh; The first thing I’d advise is for you to go for business training. A lot of the problems we have in Africa is because we are not properly informed. And even if you are a creative person, you need to have a balance. You need to be, you need to be informed as to how you should run and organise a business properly. I don’t care how talented you are, if you don’t have that, you’re not going to last very long. You know, learn what it takes to run a business properly. If you decide you want to actually make the shoes yourself, then you’ve got to have some kind of training, something that teaches you the basics of shoe making. And the best form of doing that in Africa is to apprentice with you know a skilled, someone I’ll call a master shoemaker who would train you in the basics of how to make shoes. After that, it’s practice, practice, practice.
Creator/Director – Charles Agbemashior
Associate Producer – Laurie Lawson
Camera – Agboola Sunday
Camera –Adegoke Damola
Lightening Equipment– BP Vision
Logo Design – 66th Dimension
Logo Soundtrack – Supreme Rights
Motion Graphics – Danny Debrah
Script Writer – Emmanuel Deegbe
Editor – Lawrence Obro
Sound Design – Lawrence Obro
Post Production – Trinity Digital
TAM– A Think Active Media Production
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