About us

We grew up in Madagascar. Everything we make comes from there.

Where Made in Mada comes from ?

Dimitri and I didn’t move to Sydney to start a fashion brand. We moved because life took us there, but Madagascar never left us. Between us, we have spent our entire lives on that island. Dimitri for over 25 years. My own family arrived there at the end of the 19th century.  When we landed in Australia in 2013, the things we missed most were not the landscape or the food. It was the people, the women in the villages who weave baskets at the end of the day, the way raffia smells when it’s freshly dried, the patience that goes into making something by hand. 
Made in Mada began in 2014. 

 

Woven to order : what that actually means?

Every piece in our range is made after you order it. There is no warehouse, no overstock, no end-of-season clearance.  When you place an order, the pattern goes to one of our artisans in Madagascar. She weaves it, by hand, using raffia she has processed herself. When it’s done, it is packed and sent directly from Madagascar to your address.  This takes two to three weeks. We ask for that time because we refuse to cut corners on how things are made. The result is something that carries the mark of real work, slightly imperfect in the way that handmade things always are, which is exactly what makes it worth owning.

 

Raffia : what it is and why it matters?

Raffia comes from the Raphia farinifera palm, which grows wild in the tropical rainforests of north-western Madagascar. The palm itself can reach extraordinary sizes, its leaves alone can grow up to 18 metres long. Each leaf is made up of nearly 100 smaller leaflets, which are carefully cut, dried and stripped into fibres.  Once treated, the fibre is soft, flexible and surprisingly strong. It doesn’t shrink when wet, it takes natural dyes well, and it breaks down at the end of its life rather than sitting in a landfill. The harvesting itself benefits the forest, raffia palms grow densely and need to be thinned regularly to allow other plants to flourish.  In Madagascar, weaving with raffia is not a craft revival. It has never stopped. Women in the villages around our production area have been doing this their entire lives, as their mothers and grandmothers did before them. What we do is give that work a market.

 

What buying from us supports?

Made in Mada works with artisans who are paid fairly and consistently, not seasonally, not on piece-rates that make a living impossible. We structure our orders so that our workers have income throughout the year.  They work close to home and close to their families. This is not incidental. It matters enormously to the women who make our pieces, and it matters to us.  Today, Made in Mada is stocked in more than 250 shops across Australia, New Zealand, France, Japan, Spain, Usa, Greece and the United Kingdom. Each of those stockists is, in a small way, a connection between someone on the other side of the world and the hands that made what they’re buying.

 

French, Madagascan, Australian : all three

We are, genuinely, all three. The designs we make reflect that, a certain restraint that is European, a warmth that is Madagascan, a directness that we’ve picked up from living in Australia.  We are not curating someone else’s culture. We are sharing our own. That is, we think, the only honest way to do it.