Cate.X.Couture

Our Story

My name is Catherine Kwamboka — but almost everyone calls me Cate. I'm a crochet designer, fashion stylist and model based in Kibera, Nairobi, and Cate.X.Couture is the brand I've built one stitch at a time. My love for fashion started in childhood. Long before I knew it could ever be a career, I was making tiny clothes for our dolls out of scraps of fabric with a needle and thread — I was barely six years old. Around the age of twelve, a friend and I taught ourselves to crochet with yarn and hooks borrowed from her mother's shop. We didn't even know the names of the stitches; we just kept making bags. I grew up surrounded by craft, too — my aunties crocheted shawls and seat covers — and although they weren't really teachers, I learned by watching them keenly and figuring out the rest on my own. In 2020, everything changed. During my pregnancy and the COVID period, I finally sat down and learned crochet properly, from scratch — the real names of the stitches, how to keep them neat, how to work rows and rounds, and how to read and translate patterns instead of guessing. What began as an escape and a kind of therapy slowly grew into a craft, and then into a business. I like to say it is what happens when passion meets papers. My first customers were friends and family. I made pieces for free just to practise, then took my first real orders — including a young styling client I was mentoring, who trusted me enough to pay for a handmade set. Every order built my confidence and my skill, and today people who once watched me now come to me for advice on technique and on how to price handmade work fairly. Sustainability is at the heart of what I do. I'm passionate about slow fashion, so alongside fresh yarn I upcycle materials that would otherwise be thrown away — old jeans and t-shirts reborn as one-of-a-kind bags, apparel and accessories. Because each piece is made entirely by hand, no two are ever exactly the same, and I gladly take custom orders in the colours and sizes you love. I'm also part of the Afribit Upcycling Queens, the women-and-girls collective led by Steph, which I joined after meeting them in a sewing class — discovering, almost like magic, that they were already doing the very upcycling work I had dreamed of starting myself. Through Afribit I also found Bitcoin: I've completed my first Bitcoin classes and now accept payments in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network — fast and low-fee, straight from a phone. For me that's part of a bigger circular economy: discarded fabric turned into lasting value, and creativity turned into a sustainable livelihood right here in my community. This is still just the beginning. My goal is to keep growing Cate.X.Couture, to master tailoring so I can craft every detail myself, and to show other young people that with dedication and purpose, creativity really can become a career — one stitch at a time.