The Basket That Outlasts the Souvenir: How a Kenyan in Vancouver Built an Export Lane for Home

The first baskets Jackee Kasandy carried across the Atlantic were not inventory. They were luggage — kiondo bags, woven trays and beaded ornaments stuffed into a suitcase after a visit home to Kenya, the kind of things you bring back because they remind you of where you are from. In Vancouver, friends kept asking the same question every time they saw one slung over her shoulder or sitting on a shelf: where can I get that? It took years of hearing it before she stopped treating the answer as a shrug and started treating it as a business.

Today that instinct has hardened into a company, Kasandy | Locally Global, that supplies handcrafted Kenyan and East African goods to Canadian buyers who would otherwise only encounter them on holiday. The story, reported this week by the diaspora outlet Mwakilishi, is in one sense a small one — a single entrepreneur in British Columbia selling baskets and home décor. In another sense it is a case study in something Kenya's economic planners have talked about for years and rarely solved: how to turn the country's vast informal craft sector into something that earns reliably, all year, from markets far beyond its borders.

From Corporate Campaigns to a Fair-Trade Counter

Kasandy did not start as a merchant. After finishing university in Kenya she moved to Canada and spent close to two decades inside the marketing machinery of North American business, running campaigns at advertising agencies and later managing brand portfolios for large institutions in British Columbia. It was a career built on understanding why consumers reach for one product over another, how a story attaches itself to an object, and what makes a shopper in Toronto or Vancouver trust a label.

That background matters, because it explains why her venture looks different from the well-meaning craft stalls that often represent African goods abroad. When she left the corporate world in 2014 to build the business, she did not present kiondo bags and soapstone carvings as charity or as ethnic curiosities. She positioned them the way a marketer positions anything she believes in: as premium objects with provenance, durability and a story worth paying for. "People in Vancouver are receptive," she told Mwakilishi. "They care about making a difference in the world and are interested in handmade products, and they are curious and excited about the stories of the people they buy from."

The Souvenir Trap

Her pitch leans on a point that sounds like salesmanship until you sit with it. "A Kenyan basket will last you 30 years," she said. "It's a good return on your money." The line is doing real work. It reframes an item most Western buyers file under "souvenir" — disposable, sentimental, cheap — into the category of durable goods, where a higher price feels justified.

That reframing addresses a structural weakness that has trapped Kenyan artisans for generations. The country's biggest exports — tea, coffee, cut flowers, avocados — move through mature supply chains with established buyers, cold storage, freight forwarders and predictable international demand. Handicrafts have none of that scaffolding. For most weavers, carvers and beadworkers, the customer is a tourist: someone passing through an airport gift shop, a hotel boutique or a roadside curio stand. When visitor numbers dip — a bad season, a security scare, a pandemic — the income vanishes with them.

The result is an entire creative economy that depends on people physically traveling to Kenya in order to buy what Kenyans make. Very little reaches overseas shelves through organised, year-round export channels. A craft sector that should be a steady earner instead behaves like a gift shop.

What the Diaspora Can Move That Cargo Ships Can't

This is where the diaspora angle stops being incidental and becomes the point. Kenyans abroad have historically been framed in economic terms as a source of remittances — money sent home to relatives. Increasingly, some are functioning as something more useful and harder to replicate: a distribution network with built-in cultural fluency. They know the products, they know the artisans or can find them through family, and they understand the foreign market well enough to price, brand and sell into it.

Kasandy's model is, at bottom, the substitution of a person for a logistics system Kenya never built. Instead of waiting for a buyer to fly to Nairobi, she sources directly from artisan groups, brings the goods to Canada, and sells them as home décor and fashion rather than holiday mementos. By dealing with producers directly, she is also able to push more of the final sale price back toward the people whose hands made the object — the difference between fair-trade sourcing and the thin margins of the curio trade.

It is not a one-woman effort by accident, either. Beyond her own company, Kasandy has been active in Canada's Black business community, co-founding an organisation to support Black entrepreneurs and backing efforts to channel startup financing toward founders who struggle to access it. The export of baskets, in other words, sits inside a broader project of building commercial infrastructure where little existed.

Lessons From Asia's Craft Economies

Kenya's challenge is not a lack of talent or product. It is a lack of plumbing. Other countries have shown what the plumbing can do. India and China turned traditional handicrafts into multi-billion-dollar export industries by building dedicated systems to promote and ship cultural goods abroad. Vietnam and Indonesia folded their weaving, pottery and woodwork into global supply chains, giving artisans access to steady foreign demand rather than seasonal tourist spending.

Kenya has not yet assembled a comparable framework, even as its government repeatedly identifies the diaspora as a development partner and talks up "value addition" across creative industries. Until that framework exists, the bridges will keep being built one entrepreneur at a time — by people like Kasandy who happen to have both the contacts at home and the market knowledge abroad to make the connection work.

More Than a Transaction

There is a quieter argument running underneath the commercial one. Kenyan craftsmanship already carries national weight: beadwork, soapstone carvings, woven baskets and carved sculptures are routinely chosen as state gifts to visiting dignitaries, presented as emblems of the country's identity. When Pope Francis visited Kenya in 2015, he was given a hand-carved safe of traditional items alongside a Swahili Bible produced with local craftsmanship — objects deemed worthy of a head of state.

The people who make those objects rarely share in that prestige. They remain at the mercy of foot traffic and tourist seasons, their skill recognised at the level of diplomacy but undervalued at the level of income. What Kasandy is testing, from a studio in Vancouver, is whether the same baskets handed to popes and presidents can also earn a stable living for their makers when sold deliberately, year-round, to ordinary households abroad. Each bag or carving that finds a permanent place in a Canadian home, rather than a drawer of holiday keepsakes, is a small wager that they can.