On the day she met Miriam Wachira, Cherie Kihato asked a stranger to trust her with a stack of carpets. She was hosting an event, she explained, and if Wachira let her take the carpets, she would sell them and bring back the money. Wachira owned Mbace Africa Handicraft, a weaving workshop in Nairobi, and she said yes. Nearly a decade later, the two women are still working together. What began as a favour became the foundation of Savannah Space, a Kenyan furniture and home décor brand. It also became something larger: the place where Kihato discovered what her business was for.
The calling came first, but it came without a shape. Kihato studied at a university in the United Kingdom and returned to Kenya in 2017 intending to work in development. Then, she has said, she was journaling one day and felt God tell her to start a furniture brand made in Kenya that would employ Kenyans. A profile by Kua Ventures, the Nairobi organisation that backs entrepreneurs who create jobs, describes her path from jobless graduate to founder as one of faith, resilience and vision. But a calling is not yet a plan. She still had to learn who she was building for, and what, exactly, she would be building.
Her first venture was a platform that brought furniture producers and home décor sellers together through pop-up events in Nairobi. Hunting for exhibitors meant visiting workshops, and in those workshops she kept meeting artisans whose work rarely reached larger markets. Many were women who had spent years perfecting their craft. Yet their work was often treated as souvenir material, not design, or as something for tourist stalls, not luxury interiors. Kihato saw no such distinction. She defines luxury as quality, uniqueness, intentionality and time, and she says craft is exactly that. Standing among the weavers, her idea of what she was building began to change.
What she saw in weaving was easy to miss. When people see a rug, she says, they see the finished object, not the thinking that went into it. The patterns, especially geometric ones, require real mathematics, and she says that work is rarely acknowledged. The process is slow. Wool is sheared from sheep, spun into yarn, washed, dyed and stretched onto looms before a pattern begins, and a single rug can take weeks. She calls it a regenerative art form, because the fleece that might have been discarded becomes the start of something that lasts. It is also a lesson she applies to the whole business. “With handmade things, you cannot rush them.”
It is the people, though, who explain why she stayed. Wachira says Kihato has created many opportunities for her and for other women in the weaving industry. Ruth Nyakeo, a weaver of 22 years who taught herself the craft, says the work paid for her children’s schooling and gave her an understanding of design she did not have before. Kihato points to what that steady work means in practice: regular orders and a consistent income, not a single payment, so that a family can plan and grow. For women in a trade where work can be unpredictable, that stability is part of what luxury looks like.
She also believes something is at stake beyond any one household. To Kihato, weaving is a dying art form, and if people do not preserve it, no one else will. Her concern reaches across the continent, where many indigenous industries have struggled to compete with imported goods and mass production. But she sees a window opening, with growing interest in African design creating chances for businesses that invest in local manufacturing. Her conviction is that supporting those businesses keeps more value inside African communities, and that the craft traditions long carried by women should be part of that story, not left at its edges.
Savannah Space brings that belief into a working business. It designs and makes furniture and décor in Kenya, drawing on African fabrics, architecture, landscapes and cultural traditions while meeting the needs of modern homes. Ideas often begin as her sketches, inspired by nature, travel and craft traditions around the country, and others come out of conversations with the carpenters in the workshop. She insists the designs are a collaboration, and says the carpenters’ input is vital. The result is meant to be functional art: pieces that are beautiful and useful, and built to last.
Telling that story has become part of the work. As she described it in April 2026, she joined TikTok about two and a half years earlier, during a difficult season when she was spending more time at home than at the workshop. She found a place where people simply shared their stories, and she uses it to show what building a manufacturing business in Kenya really involves, as well as life in Nairobi. It has brought real clients: people walk into the showroom and say they found Savannah Space online. In 2026, she was named one of two Kenyan creators on TikTok’s Global Discover List, which recognises 50 influential creators worldwide. Her advice to others in TikTok’s African All-Stars series was to “Be unapologetically yourself.” She is honest about the difficulty. Manufacturing in Kenya is extremely hard, she says, and there are few visible examples for young founders to follow. She also rejects the idea that Africans will not buy African luxury, noting that most of her clients, including in Kenya, are Africans. She believes more Black Africans should start luxury brands.
Her plans are ambitious and patient: to grow the workshop team, take Savannah Space into other African markets and, eventually, beyond the continent. When fear arrives, she asks herself one question: “Would Cherie of 80 regret not doing this?” What the weavers gave her is harder to measure, and probably more lasting. She arrived with a calling and a few borrowed carpets. She left each workshop visit with a purpose: to show that the hands that make these objects deserve to be recognised as designers. The luxury she is building was never only about what sits in a showroom. It is about who gets credit for making it.
