The Relationship
Before Ada Creative Investment Firm formally existed, our founder, Tejiri Jarju, worked closely with Tesito Connection, a family-run African fashion and craft house.
The engagement became an early testing ground for many of the ideas that would later shape Ada: how creative businesses can strengthen their brand, organize their operations, expand their product offering, create opportunities for
The Challenge
Tesito Connection was born out of a vision: to shift the global narrative around African craftsmanship and celebrate the heritage behind handmade goods. With no outside funding and no formal team beyond the founders, this family business set out to launch a luxury Afrocentric brand rooted in story, tradition, and global relevance.
As a co-founder, I stepped into nearly every role: creative director, e-commerce strategist, photographer, cultural researcher, and digital marketer. With over 300 products in rotation, and dreams bigger than our margins, the challenge was to build a strong and scalable brand from the inside out without compromising the richness of our mission.
Our Strategy
Brand & Identity Design
We strengthened the visual and storytelling direction of the company so that individual products connected back to a recognizable brand and cultural story.
Digital Infrastructure
The product offering was developed into an e-commerce catalogue of approximately 300 SKUs, creating a much larger digital representation of Tesito’s work and giving customers more ways to engage with the brand.
Content & Marketing
The work also explored how a growing creative business could create opportunities for other people. This included developing a student-to-talent pipeline, testing sustainable creative pay structures and creating reusable systems that made it easier for new contributors to participate in the work.
The Impact
- $5,000+ in first 6 months from online + offline sales
- 300+ products managed, photographed, tagged, priced, and marketed
- 4 major press features in the first 90 days of business
- 20K+ impressions from consistent storytelling and engagement
- Permanent Fashion Show Execution at Silicon Valley African Film Festival
- International exposure through the African Diaspora Network in Japan
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Helped co-founder (my mother) actualize her long-held vision of creative, dignified African representation
