Francesca De Gottardo

Building positive working relationships is important for any business. But for Francesca De Gottardo, who launched a purpose-led business with operations spanning two continents, it was essential.

Her ethical fashion business Endelea, a finalist in the FedEx Small Business Grant 2021 contest, now employs 28 people across its base in Milan and its workshop in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Garments are designed in Italy, where De Gottardo lives, and produced in Tanzania by local tailors and seamstresses, using fabrics sourced from local markets.

“My goal was always to create value together with the people of Tanzania,” she explains. “We use a percentage of revenues to sponsor educational programmes in Tanzania. So, the more we sell, the more impact we can have.”

Purpose has always been at the heart of the business. The tailors who work for Endelea are paid 96% more than the average salary in Tanzania, De Gottardo says, plus they receive healthcare insurance. Endelea also covers the cost of their transport to and from work and provides free lunches.

But despite offering these incentives, finding enough local tailors with the right skills and work ethic wasn’t always easy. Tailoring is a casual industry in Tanzania; when De Gottardo was initially planning Endelea, she learned that the university in Dar es Salaam had no programme for fashion education. “I met one woman tailor and asked if she could help me find others,” she explains. “We have senior tailors that we have reached by word of mouth. Some come from the university; some come from tailoring school; we started working with them as interns.”

Some of the tailors started working with Endelea as interns, learning and developing their skills over time, she adds. “I’m very happy we’ve been able to create this environment in which people grow and teach each other.”

De Gottardo’s efforts in establishing good relationships has helped Endelea reach more than 2,800 customers and achieve 140% growth year-on-year in 2022. The company’s biggest market is Italy followed by Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and there are plans to begin selling to the U.S. in late 2022 or early 2023.

Here, she shares three lessons she has learned from building vital business relationships in an unfamiliar market.

De Gottardo had planned to return to Tanzania in spring 2020 to oversee production of a new collection. However, just three months after she officially incorporated Endelea, a lockdown was enforced in Italy in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving De Gottardo stuck at home in Milan and unable to travel to Endelea’s workshop. That meant she had no choice but to trust the new team in Dar es Salaam to get on with the work without her.

“I shipped the paper patterns and we did a lot of video calls on WhatsApp to show how they’re supposed to be made,” she recalls. “They created the whole collection by themselves - which was amazing.” The team’s success in producing the clothes without her prompted De Gottardo to register Endelea as a company in Tanzania in partnership with one of the tailors, Rose Minja.

Working with local tailors wasn’t always easy. De Gottardo quickly found that differences in working cultures between Italy and Tanzania presented challenges when it came to getting the work done. “It’s very complicated in a country like Tanzania to work with tailors full-time,” she explains. Because tailors in Tanzania largely work freelance at home, being expected to arrive at a place of work on time, to operate as part of a team or to have the quality of their work scrutinized was new and different. As a result, some were unhappy and left.

To encourage local tailors to adapt, De Gottardo and her business partner implemented incentives; they made the free lunch dependent on tailors being on time for work, and they introduced a bonus system. “We made them responsible for their own work, and little by little we’ve created a work ethic. And people have stayed, and the teamwork is amazing.”

De Gottardo is determined to scale up and collaborate with other ethical projects. But, as Endelea grows, the business needs more skilled tailors to produce garments - and none of the candidates supported by charities she’s looking to collaborate with have been able to meet Endelea’s standard. To solve this challenge, Endelea has launched a placement scheme in the Dar es Salaam workshop.

“We collaborated with a social enterprise called the Mabinti Centre, run by the hospital in Dar es Salaam, for women affected by fistula surgery,” explains De Gottardo. “They already sew but maybe not at an international standard. The idea is that we have one person from Mabinti work with us. She gets paid just like our tailors and she gets to experience the way we work and learn from her peers. And then after two months she’ll go back to the Mabinti Centre and someone else will come.”

The scheme is already underway, De Gottardo says, and the aim is to train everyone from the centre, which would enable them to sell their own products beyond Tanzania. It also benefits Endelea by growing the pool of skilled talent in the local area. “The goal would then be to have other projects work with us in this way. I want to share our knowledge,” she says.