6 stores · curated ORBIS register
Gigiri, Nairobi
Blue Rhino, in Nairobi since 1999, sells handmade homeware, gifts and jewellery in brass, leather, ceramics, linen, bone inlay, beadwork and driftwood. The business supports 582 artisans annually across 14 women's groups and 246 Kenyan partner companies, and promises Nairobi deliveries within 48 hours.
Best for Handmade brass and leather homeware
Karen / Mbagathi Ridge / Online
Kazuri makes ceramic bead jewellery in Nairobi, using clay sourced from the foothills of Mount Kenya. Founded by Lady Susan Wood in 1975, the business began as a small workshop providing employment for women nearby. Its artisans shape the beads by hand before painting and firing them for use in jewellery sold through the brand's collections.
Best for Handcrafted Kenyan ceramic bead jewellery
Kazuri makes handcrafted jewellery from African clay in Nairobi, and has been doing so for five decades. Each bead is formed and finished by hand, which is why no two pieces carry quite the same colour or weight. The workshop treats that variation as the point rather than as a tolerance to be engineered out.
The Heritage Collection is where the house looks back at itself. It draws on the patterns and colours it describes as its own DNA, taken from the original styles it launched with and remade with the same intent.
Newer work runs alongside it. The Mara Moon Collection pairs traditional African clay jewellery with a modern bohemian turn, setting earthy pastel tones against brighter colour, and a separate collaboration with Yakaa Studio runs to three collections of its own.
The part worth planning around is the Kazuri Bead Bar, a creative space open to visitors in Nairobi. A guided tour comes with a jewellery-making workshop, and all tools and materials are provided, so you leave with something you shaped rather than something you picked off a tray.
Nairobi / Karen (Karen Blixen estate)
Ceramic jewelry made since 1975, when Lady Susan Wood started Kazuri with two women in her Karen Blixen estate garden shed. Today hundreds of Kenyan women, many single mothers, shape Mount Kenya clay into fair-trade beads.
Best for Ceramic jewelry made since 1975
Lady Susan Wood was born in 1918 in a mud hut in the Ituri Forest, where her English missionary parents were stationed; she and her husband settled in Kenya in 1947 and eventually ran a coffee plantation on the old Karen Blixen estate outside Nairobi — the farm made famous by "Out of Africa." In 1975, alongside two disadvantaged women, she began rolling and painting ceramic beads in a garden shed on the estate, meant as a small income project rather than a business plan.
It grew because the need was larger than two jobs: Kazuri became a dedicated employer of women, especially single mothers with no other income source, and now employs hundreds who shape clay carried down from Mount Kenya into beads, painted and fired by hand. The company is a member of the World Fair Trade Federation, which audits its wages and working conditions, and visitors can walk through the workshop and watch the process from raw clay to finished strand — the same conversion Wood started, at a much smaller scale, half a century ago.
Village Market / Gigiri, Nairobi
Kazuri Beads' page explains that its name means "small and beautiful" in Swahili. It says the business began in 1975 as a tiny workshop experimenting with making ceramic beads.
Best for Handmade ceramic beads
Nairobi
Kuzi Pottery Studio runs pottery classes from two Nairobi branches, at 80 Kisembe Road in Karen and inside Bao Box on General Mathenge Drive in Westlands, teaching hand-building and wheel-throwing techniques. Co-founder George has worked as a production potter across Kenya for over 20 years, and classes range from KSh1,500 to KSh4,000.
Best for Pottery classes and hand-thrown ceramics
Nairobi
MOPTI Living curates contemporary handmade homeware, fragrance, textiles, baskets and ceramics sourced from across Africa, using materials such as recycled metal, ankara fabric and elephant grass. It offers free delivery on orders over KES10,000 and features an African Proverbs Series of art prints priced at KSh3,200 each.
Best for Curated african homeware and decor
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