A Return to Self: An Interview with Rahimat Adetunji, Shop Rhai

Faramade Olaitan
Jul 5
5 min read

Rahimat Adetunji: "You have to keep at it for it to make sense.”

Rahimat Adetunji is a designer based in Nigeria and the creative director and founder of Shop Rhai, an accessories brand that makes shoes and bags from leather and indigenous fabrics.

“When I started Rhai, it was just a shoe brand. I wear size 42 or 43 and I have flat feet, so growing up it was really hard to get nice shoes. I remember in my final years in secondary school I used to have like the ugliest shoes, because when we would get to the market we would walk all through it for like two hours, and at that point anything my mom saw that was in my size she would buy it. I couldn't even argue or anything. By the time I got into university, I started getting shoemakers to make my shoes, I’d just give them designs, and then they’d make them.”

Adetunji says “It was at a point when handmade shoes were not all that. If you saw handmade shoes, you would know they were handmade. They looked very basic, very masculine. I used to have to tell the shoemakers ‘I want it like this, can we make the shape like this instead, so it doesn't look so serious.”

The designer says she started the brand because “at the time my dad was sick and was the breadwinner of the family. I felt even though I was still like in school, I needed to find a way to make some money for myself and not depend on this man that is on a sick bed.

“My friends were like, ‘you already kind of do this thing for yourself, so why not like solve that problem for other people’, and that was how we started, at the time it was Footies by Rhai, this was in 2017 and so gradually we went from selling just shoes to people saying they wanted matching bags around 2020. Then in 2022 I went home and saw a couple of my mum's Aṣọ Òkè, and I thought ‘this would look really nice for a bag.”

Adetunji says she does not have a specific creative process. “I'm a very spontaneous person. Sometimes it starts from seeing the fabrics first, or the leather. Sometimes I see leather and I'm like, ‘oh my God, I think it would look really nice as a mini bag.’ Then the material informs the design that comes with it.

“Most times though it’s the design first. If I get inspired and feel I want to work on a design, we go to the market to source for leather and fabrics that would work for it, then we take it to the artisans. That's where we go through the pattern drafting for the design, then the cutting and production, and then put it on the market.”

Speaking on how she comes up with new designs she says “It's often from what customers want. There are quite a number of designs that might have been something before, and then customers will say ‘I want this one to have a zip in this place, I want it to look this way.’ Then after we create it, it looks really nice, and I think other people might like it.

“I also get inspiration from everything around me. Like in our new collection, we have a design that is like a barrel, it's from the Gángan drum. Then there’s S ike, which was a failed attempt at making a croissant bag, and it's kind of like what everybody likes from the collection now, just because of the shape. It’s very irregular, very different, it was us trying to create something then it became something else and I’m like ‘oh well, this looks nice too.”

On dealing with setbacks in her work, she says “for me, I believe nothing good comes easy, so if I have a setback, I see it as just another thing I have to overcome. How I handle it, depends on what it is, but any setback we have to just face head on and try to figure out a way around it.”

The founder says she did not see herself being a designer when she was younger “If you see me physically, till now I struggle to advertise. I’m a very reserved person so growing up I would never have thought I would be into buying and selling, not to talk of owning a brand. I used to make bags from denim material that was around the house, I would cut them and make basic shapes, but that was just for the fun of it.”

She adds that “In my university days, there were times that my sister would give things to sell to my friends. I would just keep them and at the end of the semester, I'd take them back to her. I really hate selling to people, like physically. So, if anybody had told me, ‘Oh you’ll graduate and have a whole brand’ and I wouldn't have believed it.”

Speaking on Rhai’s new collection ‘Return to Self’ Adetunji says “Most of our designs were born out of what people want, what they were asking for, what was selling at the time. It kind of just got to a point that I realised I wasn't exactly enjoying the creative process anymore, I wasn't creating things that I loved and would carry if I'm going out. I realised that I'd be trying to pick a bag, and not really be feeling anything, so I wanted to design things that felt like me.

“I just wanted the excitement, because the year we launched the Mini Hobo, was when this collection was supposed to have been launched, but it was a lot for me. I just had a baby, I was really going through postpartum brain fog, the Mini Hobo was like the only thing I could come up with then. It’s something that should have still been part of this collection” she adds.

“They are just things that I really love, things that feel like me, things that I would want to carry if I was going out, and those are the things that I tried to design from in this collection.”

The designer says her favourite pieces of her own are “the Maxi Aṣọ Òkè bag, the Mini Hobo bag and the Barrel bag from the new collection.”

Adetunji's advice to anyone who wants to break into the industry is “just start. I know that we all want to start when things are perfect and everything looks good, especially with how social media is now. When we started, social media was a lot more forgiving. Instagram was just a couple of years old, so we could wing it, but I know that now everybody wants to start when they have the perfect branding, the perfect product, but sometimes those are things that would happen along the line, you can't have it all figured out from the get-go.

“I started with like 10,000 naira in 2017 and if I was waiting for when I had enough money, when I had everything figured out, I might never have started. So, what I would say to anybody to just start, as long as you have your product, you’ll have it figured out as time goes. Be consistent, because sometimes it might not work. Most times, it won't work immediately. You have to keep at it for it to make sense.”

Shop Rhai’s ‘Return to Self’ collection is available to shop on their website.