Meet the Artisans: The Women of Uganda Who Handcraft Every Zuri Styles Piece

Scroll through most "ethically made" jewelry and accessories brands and you'll find the same vague language repeated: "handcrafted by artisans," "made with care," "supporting communities." It sounds good and means almost nothing, because it never tells you who, where, or how.

Zuri Styles works differently. Every category in the catalog — earrings, bags, wallets, baskets, recycled-paper jewelry — can be traced to a specific person or a specific small workshop. Not a factory. Not an anonymous "artisan collective" with no name attached. Real women, in and around Kampala, Uganda, whose names and workshops you can actually learn.

This guide introduces you to them: Anna, who hand-finishes much of the earring collection; Lillian, who runs the sewing workshop behind the bag and backpack line; the separate young entrepreneur who runs the wallet workshop east of Kampala; and the wider community of basket weavers and paper bead rollers whose hands shape almost everything else in the catalog.

It's easy to assume that because Lillian's workshop makes the bags, it also makes the matching wallets. It doesn't — and getting this right matters, because it's a different woman, leading a different team, in a different part of the country.

Unlike the jewelry and bag lines, the basket collection isn't tied to a single named artisan — it's the work of a wider community of weavers, each bringing their own pattern preferences to a shared technique passed down through generations rather than taught in a classroom.

Ugandan basket weavers use a coiling method: a core bundle of bukedo (banana-stalk fiber) is wrapped and stitched with dyed raffia in a continuous spiral, building the basket from a flat base into its final shape. The technique is slow — a single mid-sized basket can take a skilled weaver multiple days — and it's learned the same way it always has been: working alongside a more experienced weaver, not from a manual.

Pattern and color placement aren't random. Many traditional Ugandan basket patterns carry meaning tied to community, celebration, or status, and specific patterns are often passed down within families or villages. Every basket in the Zuri Styles woven baskets collection reflects one weaver's personal take on that lineage, which is also why no two are ever perfectly identical.

Alongside Anna's earring work sits a wider group of women who specialize in the bead itself: turning discarded newspaper and magazine pages into the hand-rolled paper beads found throughout the recycled paper collection. Each strip is cut, rolled by hand around a thin rod, glued, and lacquered one bead at a time — no machinery involved at any stage.

It's repetitive, skilled, detail-heavy work, and it's also where Zuri Styles' "zero newly mined metal" claim for its paper jewelry line actually comes from: the raw material is, quite literally, someone else's finished newspaper, given a second life as a bracelet, choker, or necklace component.

The fair-pay model behind every workshop in this guide isn't a recent ESG addition — it's the original structure of the brand. In 2010, founder Lily Katumba began selling one artisan's handmade jewelry to friends and colleagues and returning 100% of every sale back to her. That direct, transparent payment relationship — sell the product, return the money to the person who made it — is still the model every workshop operates under today, whether it's Anna's earring work, Lillian's bag workshop, the wallet workshop east of Kampala, or the basket weavers and paper bead rollers behind the rest of the catalog.

This is also what separates Zuri Styles' artisan model from a donation. Customers aren't subsidizing a charity case — they're paying a fair price for a well-made product, and the wages, skills training, and school fees that follow are a direct consequence of that transaction, not a separate act of goodwill layered on top.