Business Blog

Kazuri Jewellery is furnish equipped in Kenya by local women. Fair Trade jewellery Kazuri is a Swahili word meaning ‘small and beautiful’. The jewellery unquestionably lives up to its name, every piece is finished from many individual beads that are all ‘miniature and beautiful’. Each bead is suspiciously hand-crafted by one of 400 women who create the jewellery in a small village outside Nairobi. The jewellery is made from ceramic, the process involves forming clay into beads, firing them and then hand glazing them with a vibrant range of different coloured paints, firing them again before stringing. The Kazuri Beads enterprise was started in 1975 by Lady Susan Wood. Lady Wood was born in a mud hut in the Belgian Congo to missionary parents. From a young age she was accustomed to living under difficult circumstances, a year after her birth her parents decided to return to England. To make this journey they had to travel on foot across central Africa, to board a steamer to Alexandria and then another boat to England. She and her siblings remained in England at boarding school whilst her parents returned to the Congo. During the second world war she trained at Oxford as a nurse, this is where she met Michael Wood who she would later marry. Due to Michael’s asthma they emigrated to Nairobi with their children where he ran a thriving surgery.