Why We Chose Lamu: The place, the memory, and the story behind our 2026 campaign.
Lamu is my favourite place in Kenya. That is not a small thing to say in a country this extraordinary — but Lamu has held me for over a decade, through different versions of myself, different reasons for returning, different things I needed it to be. It has never once let me down. So when we started planning the SIAFU Home 2026 campaign, it felt only natural that Lamu would find its way in. What I didn't expect was quite
how.
When the Plan Changes: A Small Brand's Pivot
The original plan was Narrok Fields. We had a mood, a vision, a whole feeling mapped out — and then the wheat grass was cut. Just like that, the landscape we had imagined was gone. Flat, harvested, not quite the scene we had been building towards.
Such is the reality of building a small brand. You pivot. You laugh, a little. And then you ask yourself: what is the honest next move?
"The most meaningful things are not constructed. They are felt."
The answer, for me, was never really in doubt. When something falls away and you have to find what is true, it is almost always Lamu.
Why Lamu, Kenya Is SIAFU's Creative Home
I got married in Lamu in 2022 — at the Fort, in the old town, with people I love and a place that felt like it had been waiting for exactly that moment. When I think about the times I have felt most alive, Lamu keeps appearing on the list.
It is not just beauty, though it has that in abundance. It is something harder to name. The way light moves across coral stone walls in the early morning. The quiet of a place where there are no cars — only donkeys, and the sea. The sense that history here is not behind glass: it breathes in the architecture, the food, the wooden dhows in the harbour, the call to prayer echoing across rooftops at dawn.
Lamu's Swahili heritage — its architecture, its rhythms, its layered cultural identity — is exactly the kind of living history that SIAFU was made to be in conversation with. A brand built on the belief that objects carry meaning through use, through memory, through context. Lamu is not a backdrop for us. It is a mirror.
Craft, Place, and African Identity: What This Campaign Is About
On the 26th of November 2025, a small team arrived in Shela village with one clear intention: to create something honest, responsive to place, and rooted in community.
Creative direction came from me — with a sensitivity to material and mood that has always shaped the best of what SIAFU does. Behind the lens was Odede, one of Kenya's most significant photographers, whose approach to image-making is about revealing, not constructing. In his own words, his work aims to capture what he calls the raw essence of individuals — changing how we see ourselves through authentic, empowering representation.
Bringing local grounding to the whole project was Michael Mwangi of 199x.org, a Kenya-based creative collective and film production company whose work is always connected to its context. Together, the three of us shared a sensitivity to place that meant there was no need to over-direct. The environment led. Light dictated pace. Wind informed movement.
"It is not just the natural beauty of the environment — it is the deep connection people have with the land."
For Odede, fashion in an African context is not just clothing. It is cultural narrative woven into fabric — history, tradition, and identity carried forward through what we wear and how we wear it. This philosophy aligns exactly with SIAFU's own: that the objects we make carry the story of the hands that made them, and the places they were made for.
In Shela, clothing, texture, and environment became inseparable. Nothing was styled for its own sake. Everything belonged.
A Decade of Returning
There is something a decade of returning to the same place teaches you. It teaches you that the best creative work is not found — it is accumulated. Built slowly, through relationship, through attention, through showing up again and again until a place begins to show you things it would not reveal to a stranger.
Lamu has been doing that for me for years. Every time I leave, I bring something back that I didn't have language for before. And in November 2025, it did it for SIAFU too.
We came home with a campaign that looks like nowhere else — because it could only have been made there. That is the only kind of work we are interested in making.
Explore the Lamu lines collection
The SIAFU Home 2026 campaign launches this year.
Photography: Odede
Film: Michael Mwangi, 199x.org
Creative Direction: Tammy Tinker
Shot in Shela village, Lamu, Kenya. November 2025
