Serah Kassim, Pattern Maker and Founder of the Fashion retail brand Serah Kassim, a made in Nigeria retail brand that uses Afrocentric clothing to promote African textiles for women. A Bsc Graduate of Botany from the University of Lagos, Nigeria and currently running an MBA program at Nexford University, a next-generation, online university based in Washington DC.Serah is an e-commerce enthusiast with over 8years of experience both in the Pattern-making, Fashion design, Entrepreneurial and E-commerce space. 

With a deep passion to empower young African women with the right fit to feel beautiful and confident to win in a well tailored dress, she explored her love for design.

In 2017, the Serah Kassim brand was amongst the 1000 successful business idea selected from about 100,000 applicants in Africa by the Tony Elumelu foundation whose business idea would transform Africa.

 

In 2018, Serah started officially launched the “Serah Kassim” brand, a registered clothing brand that was born out of the need to empower young African women with the right fit, to feel beautiful and confident to win, in a well tailored Afrocentric garment.

 

The Serah Kassim brand is all about empowering young women and with this, she launched the Free Yearly “Learn a subskill with SerahKassim”. A yearly empowerment initiative launched to inspire, support young vulnerable women living in slums by providing free fashion creative and design training opportunities for informal education towards employment to young women. This initiative has empower about 500 women and partnered with Kindle Africa in 2019, a women Empowerment Integrated Education Center, Makoko Lagos, Nigeria to empower more women yearly. Due to this initiative and more, in 2019, the Serah Kassim brand was selected by the Public Affairs Section of the US consulate as one of the 100 participants from 6000 for the inaugural Academy of Women Entrepreneurs (Awe). A White House led women’s global development and prosperity initiative.

 

In 2020, Serah Kassim launched the retail brand of Serah Kassim, www.serahkassim.com  to provide ease with shopping Afrocentric garment online while empowering African women with the Right fit to feel beautiful and confident in a well tailored garment.

Over the last year, Serah was selected as one of the recipient of the Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF), and the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC), through the Export Expansion Facility Programme (EEFP) grant partnership to accelerate the performance of 50 TEF Entrepreneurs in Nigeria within the non-oil Export Sector. She was also selected with other African women founders to get additional grant funding from the TEF alumni network in partnership The “Women Entrepreneurship for Africa” (WE4A) jointly supported by the European Union (EU), the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the German Development agency GIZ (E4D program).

 

Serah is a huge fan of the Zara brand, she believes that one day Africans would create global retail brands that can stand side by side with their global counterpart. Serah Kassim is enthusiastic about life, loves reading, watching movies and traveling. Her most admired entrepreneurs are Sara Blakely and Armancio Ortega, as she hopes that one day the Serah Kassim brand will truly put Africa Fashion on the global retail map.