The Quality Makers: Diarra Bousso of DIARRABLU

Can you introduce DIARRABLU? I'd love to hear about the name as well.

DIARRABLU is a contemporary lifestyle brand focusing on womenswear. The name is a combination of my name and a concept of BLU. It was intentional to write ‘BLU’ without the E because it's not about the color blue. It's more the feeling. For me, BLU represents that feeling when you're staring at the ocean and it just goes on forever. That feeling of possibilities, abundance and endlessness. I wanted to attach that feeling to my name to represent what this brand is about. We do high quality customization that covers all sizes, all body types and shapes. The name is also meant to keep me motivated, as starting a brand or a business is not easy. Everytime I look at the logo and the name I am reminded that this is meant to go on and I am meant to continue.  

It says on your website that your brand is born from your own daydreams. I'm wondering what those daydreams are and how your personal journey is related to the creation of the brand.

I've always been… I wouldn't say absent minded, but I'm always in my head. I live more in my daydreams than I do in reality. I’ve always been a daydreamer – daydreaming of the sea, of freedom, of travel, of possibilities. When envisioning this brand, I thought: how do I create a universe where those daydreams are valid? When I began, I was still working in finance, and I was in a very sad place in my life. I started drawing as an escape. I wanted to design collections and artwork to inspire people and spark joy. That's what led to DIARRABLU also being a resort wear brand because I was always dreaming of my next vacation. I could’ve never  imagined the brand to grow into what it is today. That process was just a way to occupy myself mentally. Now I see people wearing my designs on their holidays in these beautiful destinations and I think: this is what I used to dream about. 

How did fashion, art and design play a role in your upbringing?

I grew up in Senegal, and I would say we’re one of the most creative peoples in the world. Fashion for me started in my own house. My mom is the most fashionable person I know. In my culture, your clothes are generally made from a seamstress. Everybody's dress is going to be different because everyone is wearing custom-made clothing. My mom always had a new dress, every single week. She'd buy new fabrics from the market, draw her own designs and go get them made. Fashion is something I saw everyday, being created in front of me. 

In Senegal, back in the day when we had kingdoms, before we were colonized, what you did for work was tied to your last name. On my father’s side, we have an artisan last name, so they were in the leather and ceramics side of craftsmanship. My grandma was a renowned leather artisan in her region. She was also an amazing ceramics artisan – she used to sell them at our local market. All of her kids went and became leather artisans, except my dad. My dad is the only one who actually went to school, learned how to read and ended up becoming a banker. But my dad was still obsessed with art and would buy beautiful artwork all the time. He encouraged me to be creative, so I used to paint and draw as a child and no matter how ugly it was, he would frame it and hang it up. I thought I was an artist since I was 10 years old, and my ego was through the roof. That’s why it felt very natural to be doing something creative for work. The hard part is being taken seriously because not everyone will celebrate me like my parents do.  

Tell me about how your creation process started and how it has grown over time.

I actually started with leather, because that's what I knew. I was making luxury handbags. At that time, I didn't know anything about the supply chain, so I would make these beautiful bags and post them on Instagram. When people would order them, I didn't have enough leather to make the next one, so I had to make the bags really expensive so that nobody would buy them. I started pricing the bags at $5,000 or more, and people were still buying them! That was a good feeling but it wasn’t sustainable or scalable. I loved the creative side but I didn’t understand the business side. Everytime I would sell 2 bags, I would have enough money to take an international trip, go to Fashion Week, go to all the parties, learn about PR and then arrive back home to make another 2 bags. At some point, my parents told me – you can’t keep doing this, you need to have a real business. So I paused and I decided to approach clothing because I thought it would be easier. It wasn’t, and I got stuck with the same issue, so eventually I started creating my own prints and designs. 

Are the majority of your prints Senegal-inspired or have you pulled from different African or other worldly cultures?

Our prints are incredibly unique. A lot of them come from a process I started when I was a math teacher, where I would write equations that would generate patterns. This process really lets us test things out on various body types and models of different races and ethnicities before putting anything into production. As a result, we're able to create prints that have never been seen before.

I would say our designs are also art and travel-inspired. The cultural part comes from the fact that we wear a lot of prints in my culture. I started out wanting to create African-inspired prints, but there were discussions around cultural appropriation, and I decided that I wanted the designs to be very special and signature to who I am. As someone who is Senegalese and African but has also grown up all over the world, I wanted our prints to capture every part of me just as they should capture different audiences. 

Talk to me about tradition, sustainability, innovation and size inclusivity.

Where I come from, inclusivity and sustainability are not something cool or special. It’s the norm because you get your clothes made and tailored to your body and your liking. We are very size and height inclusive, so that’s really where tradition plays a role in my brand. The same goes for sustainability – for us sustainability shows up in our ‘made to order’ business model and in reducing waste. We’re also actively focusing more on sustainability in terms of the materials we use, but that’s a step-by-step process. 

The innovation part is about how the actual work is being done. For me, it was very important to use technology not to replace the human, but to humanize and to enhance. I use technology to speed up the design process in terms of the prints. Instead of drawing a flower, which I also still do, I use AI to generate the flower and then I have 15 different flowers in different colors and different shapes. Then, anything that I come up with in terms of textiles, I can put on a dress digitally and post them on social media in the form of a poll to get votes on what people like best. Once I know what the winning prints are, those are the ones I'm going to develop and actually make. In that way, we don't play the guessing game that the fashion industry does: producing inventory, stocking it and hoping it works based on trends. 

We only develop the prints that we know people are voting for, and once we have the print, we don't do anything with it. We produce the dress only when it's ordered. It's like a restaurant – we buy all the ingredients but only make your meal when you order it. This business model not only saves me a lot of money, but it’s also helping us reduce waste by over 60%, which is what I discuss in my latest TED Talk. If you choose a dress you like along with your size, we’ll have it to you in less than a week. We will literally make and ship your order in less than two days because we built our own system. All the clothes are made by artisan communities in Senegal, and although we still have collections, we just don’t make them seasonal because we don’t want to give anyone the idea that our prints are ‘old.’ Our bestseller to this day is something from Fall 2021, and no one has noticed. 

Tell me more about this TED Talk of yours.

I gave the talk in November of 2023. It was about buying clothes for longevity and not for the landfill. I wanted to share three key learnings from my experiences that the industry can use to make fashion more sustainable. My goal is for us to be a blueprint for what the future of fashion businesses should be like: inclusive, responsible, mindful and focused on reducing waste. We are a small company but if millions of other companies did what we did, this industry wouldn't be as bad as it is today. Perhaps our grandchildren would also have a better relationship with the earth. 

A core part of our mission is to inspire a different narrative. Legacy fashion brands have always designed for a very specific type of person, social class and model. Creating room for people who are not considered the ‘standard’ is our focus. Our models are people of color, but we also aim to be inclusive in terms of height and size. These are things that have become ‘cool’ recently, but they shouldn’t be used as a way to brag, they should be the norm. Luxury, for me, was never about a price point, it was always about freedom. When you buy a dress that makes you feel free and beautiful, that’s luxury. You can be what you want to be, and that’s enough. 

Embrace your most authentic self with DIARRABLU’s customized women’s wear!