dHope!

Through fashion, dHope! reduces the amount of waste that is released into the streets everyday by 85%. Now, instead of throwing thrash out the window when no one is looking and littering the streets, you can send in your thrash and have it turned to a bracelet or a mouse pad just like magic!

We accept plastic, old leather and fabric, rubber footwears, fading jewelries as well as worn-out vehicle spare parts such as tyre tubes, etc. These materials are cleaned/ redecorated to make beautiful fashion pieces and accessories such as phone cases, customized note book covers, hats, etc.

When these young people discover that our beautiful products are sourced from recycled materials, they will be compelled to see the importance of recycling, how valuable it could be. This would encourage and convince them in the long run to contribute to our business and sustainability by sumbitting their useful wastes.

dHope! aims at solving two major problems. First is the environmental/ sustainability apathy among youths in Nigeria and second is the problem caused by the poor waste management system as well as waste itself. The fashion industry is the second most polluting industry in the world today and young people being the most fashion conscious generation are not conscious or aware of this global issue. It is believed that young people are the future of our world and if this is true, then the world is in trouble because as it is now, only a few youths in Nigeria are aware of the SDGs and even fewer contribute to advertise, propagate or campaign for the actualization of the goals.

This youth-centered recycling awareness campaign is conveyed through fashion and style and as such, we provide clothing and accessories for these students who in turn provide us with renewable materials and resources for our work. We collect certain materials that naturally would be discarded and design beautiful fashion pieces with them. These products are listed for sale on our online store for more students to buy.  While preaching the gospel of recycling and responsibile consumption, we have been able to provide employment and happiness to students on campuses by bringing out stylish and valuable pieces from their trashcan!

Young people are passionate about what they love. If it is possible to make a young person find interest in a thing, then he or she will work passionate for that cause and that is what dHope! focuses on achieving, making youths fall in love with recycling.

dHope! focuses to reduce the amount of waste that is released into the streets everyday by 85% and we have decided to do this through sustainable fashion and style which is a major concern of the average youth. Evidently, most teenagers and other young generations are mostly concerned about their looks than even their grades in school and thus, it would really be useless if one were to try to make them care for the environment just as well as they care for their skins, hair and weight. They think that cleaning up the environment is a messy job because really, it is, and dHope! provides solutions to environmental issues just as much as it does for the social needs of the population we are targeting, youths. Now, instead of throwing your thrash out the window when no one is looking, and having them beaten by rain and shine, littering the streets before finally being burned months later by the local campus waste management team, you can send in your thrash and have it turned to a bracelet or a mouse pad just like magic!

We accept waste like plastic, old leather, fabric, jeans, rubber footwear, old and fading jewelries as well as auto spare parts such as tyre tubes to mention a few. These materials are cleaned up and redecorated to make beautiful fashion pieces and other accessories such as phone cases, pendants, mouse pads, customized note book covers, hats, etc.

When members of our target market aka young people discover that the beautiful products we make are sourced from recycled materials, they will be compelled to see the importance of recycling and how valuable it could be to them. This would encourage and convince them in the long run to contribute to our business and sustainability by sumbitting their useful wastes.

We are one of the two fashion brands in Nigeria that preaches sustainability and the only fashion brand in Nigeria that sources a percentage of its fashion products from waste. We use certain chemicals to clean up certain materials, others are used to change colours or fix wears and tears. In few months of operating, we have been recognised by local bodies in Nigeria and are set to receive some new awards soon.

We also offer "design your own aparrel" services to our clients using third party website. This service allows them to remotely design and customize their own cloths. Here, everyone becomes a fashion designer.

dHope! is not just a fashion brand, dHope! imparts youths and students in Nigeria with the knowledge of sustainable living and sustainability. To do this, it leverages on information technology and social media as a tool. We also use same as a means of reaching out to these young consumers and reducing the popular notion of recycling and sustainability as a technicality.

Currently, dHope! uses 360 degree cameras to create a touchpoint between dHope! and its customers so that they can remotely follow up the production of their wares and be a part of the whole process.

Our "design your own apparel" service uses third party design sites. This allows clients to remotely design their own clothes and meterials from the scratch. They design the clothes, we make the cloths.

So far, we have done a great job by providing means for young Nigerians, mostly students to learn about sustainability, innovatively dispose of their thrash and have provided an avenue for many of them to join our paid workforce and/or team. For us, this is a huge achievement.

We currently run a separate program that collects plastic, old clothes, leather and other renewable materials for our work. Quite surprisingly, we now receive unsolicited submissions of waste from people even outside our work territory as well as received several applications to volunteer.

Since November 2018, we have successfully empowered over two thousand young people with knowledge of the entire recycling process as well as helped manage the waste of well over one thousand and fifteen and provided cheap and sustainable fashion for one thousand, five hundred people within and outside our target market reaching a total of over 4,515 young people.

We are working on various partnerships with private organizations to extend our tentacles to other countries in West Africa and South Africa and when this happens, we will increase our workforce and prepare to serve a total of over 25,000 and 5 million young people within the next one and five years respectively. 

By 2020, we would be launching the dHope! mobile application and websites which would have features that let's people design and customize their own clothes and monitor the creation process using the video conferencing feature that would be available within the app, from this app, clients can also make and track orders and submit their useful clothing wastes.

We would need to partner with private organizations and individuals from selected countries in Africa to take the dHope! message to their nations. When this happens, we will be able to provide employment and happiness to students on campus around these countries, and affect millions of young people through information technology, sustainable fashion as well as groom changemakers and contribute to the realization of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

We plan to start a new television series to advocate for sustainability. This would be aired twice weekly by top television stations frequented by youth in Nigeria.

Before 2025, we would be securing 'The Green & dHope! Place' on seven major African campuses where physical trainings and activities would be held. We would also be hiring more hands as our current team is relatively very small compared to the work we do and the goals that we have set.

As the process of recycling is not very popular, in Nigeria, Nigerians have a perception of products made from recycled materials as inferior and unhygienic not minding the various cleaning up processes the materials have undergone before getting to them.

As business growth requires fund, we would be needing special grants that would enable us secure partnerships with national and international sustainability and fashion enthusiast to drive our message across our targeted regions.

We would also require a great deal or partnership with media companies and houses to take our plans in media to the next level.

We are enlightening our local ambassadors to in turn enlighten the public of the authenticity of our merchandise as well as exposing SDG 12 and how it is being actualized by multinational consumer goods companies around the world.

We would also use more influencial influencers aside the ambassadors who would use their influence to contribute to changing the mindset of youths. 

Our team is a group of 12 young sustainability enthusiasts and 43 volunteers who work hard to contribute to the realization of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Our founder obtained a certificate in fashion marketing and media from the University of Leeds and is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in linguistics at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Nigeria and studying fashion and sustainability at the University of Leeds on a distance learning program. We have two philosophy undergraduate students and one human anatomy student all serving as strategic media influencers and dHope SDGs Ambassadors. We have a lead seamstress and creative director with over 6 years of experience in fashion and sustainability as well as a screenwriter who is currently supervising and editing work for our upcoming sustainability campaign television series. Our team has successfully completed projects and brainstormed together for multinationals such as Unilever where we progressed to the final stage of the Unilever IdeaTrophy, Hilti where we pitched our ideas to the Malaysian board at the HILTI IT Competition and most recent L'Oréal where we got the opportunity to represent Nigeria in the African finals held in South Africa.

We believe that with the aforementioned experiences and accomplishments, we are able to run a company as dHope! in a place like a Nigeria.

No partnerships at the moment except for those with our media influencers and campus ambassadors. 

Launched with zero capital. We strategically convince customers and clients to pay for their products before they get it. We do this by creating trust and good reputation using our influencers.

Here is a perfect scenario: when a client orders for a hoodie or anything else on Instagram, the store, via phone call or any other means, one of the sales representatives puts a phone call through to confirm the order and gather useful data while also indirectly building close friendship with the client. After this is done, the client is advised to pay a certain percentage of the total of the order and as soon as he does, we run to start work. This way, we have money to pay for the necessary materials needed to process and fulfill the order. As soon as we deliver, client pays the balance of the bill. We are building great trust by using this model and also enhancing SDG 16.

NB: We either do not charge or charge very little to clients from whom we collect or have previously collected renewable materials for our work.

Because of our business model and the fact that we source a large percentage of our merchandise from waste and other renewable materials, we do not require much fund to make, process and fulfil orders.

In the next few years, as we grow, expand to more industries aside fashion, earn more international recognition, more people will need more of our sustainable fashion pieces, more sustainability conscious universities around Nigeria and Africa will provide resources and support the dHope! mission on their campuses, helping dHope! gain more publicity as well as provide a means to sustainable income and revenue.

We have always been enthusiastic about sharing our sustainability goals with others as well as having the opportunity to have our work accessed by international experts, this would help provide insight and fresh ideas to scale. Solve is one of such rare opportunities. Participating at Solve has provided some of the insights as we have been able to look at dHope! in a different way and gotten new ideas while brainstorming. So far, we have been able to complete more researches and learned more business tips as well while answering the questions.

We anticipate attracting useful networks with other sustainability enthusiastic projects which could lead to productive collaborations and investors to our business.

In a nutshell, Solve will provide a head start for our growth, equip our team with the new sikills and uplift our business financially should in case we are able to attract investments and/or partnership. Solve will also provide a new kind of recognition that would prove the authenticity of our products and processes and ultimately, put our business in the list of Solver teams which is one of our major goals.

We would love to partner with the United Nations Youth and United Nations Environment for the sake of publicity and recognition. Also, since we have partnered with the British Council on other projects as regards electronic learning, we would like to do a lot more with them in this area in order to grow the number of young people we reach out to and teach sustainability.

We would also like to partner with freelance fashion designers to meet up with our excess demand as we grow.

Since our main goal is to expand our tentacles,  funding through this prize will be used to build up more branches in other African countries thereby, increasing the company's impact, reach and profit. 

We would also use a lot here to launch our new website, mobile application, television series and ultimately to begin prototyping our *dHope Skin Vacuum in the beauty and wellness industry and install special smart bins all over our partner campuses for easy collection of fabric waste and other renewable materials.