As a girl growing up in Addis Ababa, Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu saw people all around her wearing makeshift sandals improvised from old lorry and car tyres.
Later, when she left college, she decided she would sell these handcrafted, recycled tyre shoes to the rest of the world. A decade on, she expects to turn over $6m of internet sales this year, has opened 11 shoe stores in the Far East and Europe and has plans for 50 more in the next three years.
The tyre-soled shoe developed as a result of scarcity. Waste was simply too valuable not to reuse. “When you have limited resources, everything is valued,” Tilahun Alemu says. “Everything has a purpose, even if not the purpose originally intended; and if not, one can always be found for it.”
The selate tyre-soled shoe was originally popularised by freedom fighters resisting Italian colonisation in the 1940s and subsequently spread throughout Ethiopia: extremely basic, cobbled together, ubiquitous.
Tilahun Alemu, a mother of three, is a small woman with a soft voice that belies her verve and drive. Born in 1980, she grew up in Zenabwork, one of the most impoverished areas of Addis Ababa, where her father was an electrician and her mother cooked and raised the children.
Education was seen as the route to success and Bethlehem went to local primary and high schools and then to Unity University in Addis Ababa to study accountancy. In her student years and immediately after, she worked in leather and clothing companies learning marketing, sales, design and production.
Increasingly, she became frustrated by the disjunction between profitable companies in the formal economy and the unrewarded skills in her own community.
She had grown up watching members of her family spin cotton with an inzert (a centuries-old wooden spindle); she had spun rolls of fetel (soft cotton), with her mother and watched weavers making netalla and gabbis (shawls and blankets), on traditional wooden looms. “I saw what talented people in the community could do but, owing to extreme poverty, stigma and marginalisation, many of them couldn’t get simple jobs. These were people I had grown up with, my neighbours and family.”