The Vivo Activewear Story: Wandia Gichuru built one of Kenya’s most recognisable consumer-fashion brands
In April of 2020, a company called Vivo Activewear watched eighty percent of its revenue disappear in two weeks.
The Kenyan government had ordered a lockdown. Shopping malls across Nairobi closed. Vivo’s fourteen stores closed with them. The landlords still wanted rent. The Kenya Revenue Authority still wanted tax. A container of pre-paid fabric was stuck at a port in Shanghai. One hundred and seventy-five employees, most of them women, most of them under thirty, were sitting at home with no income.
Kenya does not have a welfare state. There was no furlough scheme. There was no government cheque coming.
The founder of Vivo, a woman named Wandia Gichuru, walked into her cutting room that April and told her tailors to stop making dresses. From now on, until further notice, they were making face masks. Reusable. Cotton. Washable. In Vivo’s signature prints.
By the end of that month, the masks were sixty-five percent of the company’s revenue.
By the end of the year, Vivo had produced over one million of them.
Nobody was laid off.
This is the story of a forty-something former United Nations policy adviser who returned home from London and New York looking for something to do, accidentally invented an entire fashion category in Nairobi, and over fifteen years built the largest women’s fashion brand in East Africa — starting from her own living room.
The Midlife Crisis
Wandia Gichuru was born in Montreal, Canada, to a Canadian mother and a Kenyan father, somewhere in the mid-1960s — the exact year is one of the few details she has kept private.
She was the only daughter of four siblings. The family moved back to Kenya when she was young. She did her primary years at Kilimani Primary School. Her secondary years at Loreto Convent Msongari — the same school that has educated generations of Nairobi’s middle-class daughters. Then she left.
She did her undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She did her MBA at the University of Cape Town in 1996. And then, for two decades, she built the kind of career that the Kenyan upper-middle class is taught to want.
She worked at Kenya Wildlife Service. She worked at Citibank. After her MBA she joined the World Bank as an operations analyst. From there she went to JP Morgan in London, as an associate. From JP Morgan to the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, also in London, as a governance adviser. From DFID to the United Nations Development Programme in New York, as a policy adviser.
Twenty years. Four cities. Some of the most prestigious institutions in international development and global finance.
And then, in 2009, in her mid-forties, she walked away from all of it. She moved back to Nairobi.
She has described this period in her own words. Classic midlife crisis. She has used that phrase, on the record, in multiple interviews. She filled her days with the things she had not had time for in two decades of policy work. She danced. She did yoga. She joined fitness classes.
And she ran into a problem so small that it would, eventually, become a business.
She could not buy dance sneakers in Nairobi.
She could not buy yoga clothes. She could not buy activewear that was actually made for the activity. She has said it plainly: they just weren’t available. Anything she found was either imported at a luxury markup, or it was secondhand mitumba clothing from the bales that arrived weekly at Gikomba market — none of it designed for what she actually needed to do.
She mentioned this to a friend. The friend’s name was Anne Marie Burugu. Burugu, also Kenyan, agreed. They both saw the same gap.
In 2011, the two of them put in some of their own savings and started a business. They called it Vivo Activewear. The thesis was extremely simple. There were Kenyan women who wanted to dance, who wanted to do yoga, who wanted to go to gyms — and they had nothing to wear. Vivo would buy activewear from manufacturers in China, in Thailand, in South Africa, and in the United Kingdom, and resell it online to Kenyan customers.
No business plan. No formal strategy. No fashion experience between the two of them. Gichuru would later say that she hired the first pattern makers and tailors out of pure desperation, because she did not know how to make a single garment herself.
The website went live in Gichuru’s living room. The inventory sat in cardboard boxes in her hallway. The customers came from her dance and yoga classes first — friends of friends, women who knew her by name.
And almost immediately, the entire business model collapsed.
The Living Room Problem
The first problem was that nobody would buy clothes they could not try on.
The internet existed in Nairobi in 2011, but the trust did not. Vivo’s customers, almost without exception, refused to commit money to a garment they had only seen on a screen. So they did the only thing that made sense to them. They drove to Wandia Gichuru’s house. They knocked on her door. They asked to try things on.
Within months, the living room was a retail floor.
Gichuru would later describe this transition as something the market did to her, not something she did to the market. She had not wanted to be a brick-and-mortar retailer. Online had been the whole point of the business. It was supposed to be lean, capital-light, scalable. Instead, within the first year, Vivo signed a lease for a small space at Junction Mall, on Ngong Road in Nairobi. It became their first store.
The second problem came not long after.
Gichuru, still operating on the instincts of a banker rather than a retailer, made a single inventory bet that would haunt her for the next two years. She had identified a South African yoga-clothing brand she liked. The South African supplier offered her a substantial discount if she bulk-ordered. So she did.
She has said publicly that the order represented about one quarter — twenty-five percent — of her entire inventory capital at the time. The number she has put on it, in interviews, is around five thousand US dollars.
The yoga clothes sat on the shelves for two years.
They were too expensive for the Kenyan market. The brand recognition that worked in Johannesburg did not work in Nairobi. The colours were wrong. The sizing was wrong. And because she had bulk-ordered to get the discount, she could not return them.
She has used this story, ever since, as a teaching anecdote when she speaks to other founders. The lesson she draws from it is small and brutal. Pay full retail to test the market first. Never commit capital you cannot recover to a product you have not yet sold a single unit of.
But the third problem was the one that would actually reshape the company.
The imported clothes did not fit Kenyan women.
The shoulders were too narrow. The waists were too small for the hips. The thigh measurements assumed bodies that did not match the bodies of the women walking into the Junction Mall store. Vivo was selling activewear designed in Guangzhou and Shenzhen and Bangkok for a body type that almost none of its customers actually had.
Gichuru watched, week after week, as women picked up garments off the rack, took them into the fitting room, and walked back out without buying. Not because they did not want the clothes. Because the clothes did not want them.
She tried ordering custom sizes from the same factories. The factories quoted her a minimum order quantity of around ten thousand units. Vivo, at that point, was selling about fifty units of any given style per month.
Ten thousand units versus fifty units. The mathematics of importing had broken.
Africa Dressing the World
The decision Gichuru made around 2013 sounds, in retrospect, obvious. At the time, in Kenya, it was almost reckless.
She decided to stop importing finished goods. She decided to design Vivo’s clothing herself, manufacture it in Kenya, and build the supply chain that did not exist.
The reason it was reckless was that Kenya’s textile industry had been hollowed out for decades. The country had been one of the largest cotton and garment producers on the continent in the 1970s and 1980s. By the early 2010s, that industry was a memory. It had been killed, slowly, by the secondhand-clothing trade — the mitumba bales arriving weekly from Europe and North America, undercutting any local manufacturer on price.
When Gichuru went looking for fabric suppliers, pattern makers, machinists, and cutters in Nairobi, she found scattered survivors of a dead industry. There was no ecosystem. There were no training schools. The skills had not been passed down.
So she built the ecosystem. One hire at a time.
She brought in pattern makers from the few firms still doing institutional uniforms. She bought industrial sewing machines. She sourced fabric where she could. She built an in-house design team whose entire brief was to design for the body of the Kenyan woman walking into the Junction Mall store, not against her.
The strategic insight was not subtle. If imported clothes did not fit, then a brand that fit was, by definition, the only brand. Africa Dressing the World would later become Vivo’s stated vision. In 2013 it was a survival strategy.
By 2015, Vivo had seven stores and was approaching one million dollars in annual revenue. By 2016, the company won the Kenyan Fashion Brand of the Year award. The same year, Wandia Gichuru was invited to join the inaugural panel of KCB Lions’ Den — Kenya’s version of Shark Tank — as one of five investor Lions.
In 2017, Vivo won Kenyan Fashion Brand of the Year again. Two years in a row. Gichuru kept her television seat into a second season.
By 2018, she had stepped down from the panel — she would later say her own company’s growth made the time commitment impossible. The same year, she enrolled in the Stanford Seed Transformation Program, a ten-month executive course run out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business for founders of high-growth African companies.
She has said, in the Stanford profile, that she walked in without a formal business model canvas, without a board of directors, without financial systems, and without a strategic plan. She walked out with all four.
The lesson Vivo took out of Stanford was not a single tactic. It was a system. For the first time, the company had a six-year plan. For the first time, it had a budget.
By 2019, Vivo had fourteen stores across Kenya. Pre-COVID projection: forty percent year-on-year revenue growth into 2020.
The Mask Year and the Atlanta Door
The cold open of this episode is, properly, the first scene of Act Four. By March 2020, Vivo had fourteen stores, one hundred and seventy-five employees, and a forty-percent growth projection that the lockdown order erased in a single week.
The mask pivot saved the company. But the deeper truth of the mask pivot is that Vivo was able to make it at all because of a decision Gichuru had made seven years earlier, in 2013.
Companies that had stayed lean in the 2010s by importing finished goods could not pivot in 2020. They had no machines. No tailors. No cutters under contract. No way to switch from one product to another in seventy-two hours. Vivo did. The manufacturing line that had looked like an expensive burden in 2013 — building a domestic supply chain from scratch in a country where the textile industry was dead — turned out to be the only reason the company survived 2020. The capex of the prior decade paid the wages of the lockdown year.
When the masks were no longer the main product, the tailors who had stitched them went back to stitching dresses. The container of fabric finally cleared the port in Shanghai. The malls reopened. By 2022, Vivo had twenty-one stores. Annual revenue was approaching seven million dollars, with management projecting ten.
The same year, Vivo opened its first store in Kigali, Rwanda. In 2023, it opened its first store in Kampala, Uganda. East African expansion, the kind that earlier Kenyan retailers had attempted and frequently retreated from, was working — quietly, store by store.
In October 2023, Vivo Fashion Group joined the Ibuka Programme — an incubator run by the Nairobi Securities Exchange to prepare growth-stage Kenyan companies for a future equity or debt raise. That detail matters. After more than a decade of bootstrapping — roughly one million dollars in total external capital across three small rounds from directors and friends and family — Vivo was, formally, beginning to consider institutional money.
And then, in May 2024, the company stepped across the Atlantic.
On the twenty-second of May, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia, the President of Kenya, William Ruto, cut the ribbon on Vivo’s first United States store. The location was Atlantic Station, in the heart of the city. The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman — the same Meg Whitman who had run eBay and Hewlett-Packard — was present. The Mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens, was present.
Atlanta was not random. Gichuru has explained the choice publicly. Over forty percent of Atlanta residents identify as Black or African American. Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest passenger airport in the world. The city has one of the largest concentrated diaspora markets in the United States that aligns with Vivo’s customer base. If a Kenyan brand built for African bodies was going to test export demand, this was the city to do it in.
The press around the Atlanta opening called the store the company’s twenty-seventh. The number, by 2025, was twenty-nine.
The Bootstrapped Empire
As of the recording of this episode, Vivo Fashion Group operates twenty-nine to thirty stores across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and the United States. Annual revenue is reported at roughly fourteen and a half million dollars. The company employs somewhere between three hundred and sixty and four hundred and fifty people, depending on the source and the season. More than seventy percent of them are women. The majority are under thirty. One hundred percent of Vivo’s clothing is designed and manufactured on the African continent.
The brand portfolio is now three labels — Vivo Woman, the flagship, plus Safari by Vivo and Zoya. Wandia Gichuru remains chief executive. She is also the co-founder of Shop Zetu, the multi-brand online marketplace she launched separately with a partner named Marvin Kiragu, hosting more than a hundred and eighty African brands.
Anne Marie Burugu, the co-founder Gichuru started Vivo with in her living room in 2011, is still credited on the company’s About page. Her current day-to-day role is not detailed in the public record. The episode raises this honestly rather than guessing at it.
Vivo has not announced an institutional venture-capital round. The NSE Ibuka programme has signalled that a raise is coming. As of May 2026, no Series A has been formally announced.
What Vivo has built, over fifteen years, is something the African fashion industry has not previously produced at scale — a vertically integrated, locally-manufactured, multi-country women’s-fashion brand, bootstrapped on roughly one million dollars of outside capital, that has not yet hit the ceiling of what bootstrapping can do.
The open question is whether the next chapter — the Atlanta export thesis, the diaspora market, the eventual capital raise — repeats the discipline of the first fifteen years, or whether outside capital changes what made Vivo work in the first place.
A forty-something woman walked away from a UN career in 2009 because she could not buy a pair of dance sneakers in Nairobi.
Fifteen years later, the company she built clothes a continent.
Every empire has an origin. Sometimes the origin is a problem so small that nobody else thought it was worth solving. Sometimes the empire is built by the only person who decided that it was.
This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin.
Key Takeaways
- The Midlife Crisis. Wandia Gichuru was born in Montreal, Canada, to a Canadian mother and a Kenyan father, somewhere in the mid-1960s — the exact year is one of the few details she has kept private.
- Africa Dressing the World. The decision Gichuru made around 2013 sounds, in retrospect, obvious.
- The Mask Year and the Atlanta Door. The cold open of this episode is, properly, the first scene of Act Four.
- The Bootstrapped Empire. As of the recording of this episode, Vivo Fashion Group operates twenty-nine to thirty stores across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and the United States.
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