“From an early age, every time I bought a pair of shoes, I wanted to tweak them somehow by adding a bow, a zipper or something that would stamp it with my own sense of style,” recalls Botswana-born Ditirwa. “I reached the point where I had the urge to create items entirely from scratch because I knew I had the ability to do it.”
After moving to China in 2013 to study medicine on a full scholarship at Dalian Medical University, her creative urge grew into a business pursuit. She began studying fashion designing, prompted by her love for fashion and bolstered by her natural talent for drawing. “I originally considered designing a clothing line, but felt I should push myself into the more challenging line of footwear,” she says.
Studying fashion design in addition to the demands of her medical studies wasn’t viable, but giving up either pursuit was also unthinkable for Ditirwa. She therefore decided to continue her medical degree, but take the self-teaching route for shoe design, learning from online resources like Italian-based Alive Shoes, which allows artists to design their own footwear from sketch to final product.
Being in one of the world’s largest manufacturing hubs was a golden opportunity to get R’alocha Luxury Shoes off the ground. Searching for the right factory was the first step – but was far from easy, especially when people realised she was only 20 and dismissed her ambitions as a childish whim.
“China’s notorious for sub-standard products. You have to be willing to pay for good quality. I spent a lot of time sourcing a factory because the buying price of one pair of shoes was very high,” Ditirwa explains.
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