Enterprise

Artist gives junk fresh coat of life in brand of jewellery

BD2106JEWELRYevansngure

Evans Ngure’s jewelry was displayed at Dusit D2 Hotel. PHOTOS | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU

Evans Maina Ngure has been tinkering with hand tools and spare parts ever since he was a small boy, accompanying his father to get his Peugeot pick-up fixed by jua kali mechanics in Ngara or Kariokor in Nairobi.

“My father introduced me to the value of spare parts as well as to drawing his favourite cars,” said Ngure who started fashioning lorries and trucks sculptures out of spare parts from an early age.

By the time he joined Kenyatta University (KU) he had begun selling his gift cards in local craft shops.

“I had no pocket money so the cards became my first hustle,” said the 27-year-old. Nonetheless, he persevered.

He got a ‘‘soft loan’’ of Sh500 from his brother, bought himself fishing wire, Maasai beads and one bone pendant, then began making and trying to sell jewellery in a small stall in Gikomba.

That business flopped because he had targeted the wrong market.

Fortunately, he was still at KU taking a class on Multi-Media Crafts with Anne Mwiti which he sees as a turning point in his career.

“She told us to make jewellery without using conventional elements like Maasai beads.”

Mr Ngure says her task was transformative as it opened his mind to new possibilities including recycling spare parts just as he had done as a child.

He made jewellery using everything from driftwood and bamboo to nuts, bolts, spark plugs and metals wires. She gave him a good grade but she also put him on a path to recycling junk.

By this time, he had opened a Facebook page, but until he started making jewellery from ‘junk’, he did not get much traffic on the page and registered just a few sales.

Once he started making junk art jewellery, he registered his company Fufuka Limited, Swahili for ‘arise from the dead,’ which is what he says he does to junk. That was in 2011.

Having repaid his brother’s soft loan, he had to scavenge at mitumba (used clothes) sites for buttons which he transformed into button necklaces, bracelets and earrings which began to sell overnight.

His button jewellery became one of his bestsellers online, especially since he signed up with Instagram and just recently booked onto the sales platform, Etsy.com where he calls himself NgureJunkArt.

Just recently a friend helped him start up a whole new line of junk art jewellery, giving him a handful of old American coins.

BD2106JEWELRYevansn(3)

Evans Ngure's jewellery.

Artistic ingenuity

She said she had seen the way he transformed trash into treasured jewellery as well as art. So she decided to donate old copper coins to his business to see what he’d create.

Overnight, Mr Ngure brought back several pairs of penny earring which he’d carefully wrapped in slender brass wire. The friend also gave him two five cent Kenyan coins and asked if it was illegal to make her earrings from Kenya money.

“Not if you don’t deface the coin itself,” Mr Ngure says. He made her earrings only to find people were already booking them online, having seen them on Facebook.

But coin earrings and junk art jewellery are only part of Ngure’s online inventory, which he says he now sells overseas as well as locally.

“People buy my paintings as well as my jewellery,” he says, adding he’s also making dog leashes from leather and selling to breeders.

“The money I make selling dog collars and leashes is how I can buy more brass wire,” he said.

Currently, he says he’s making around Sh40,000 a month, which includes both his online and word-of-mouth sales which keep growing as more people appreciate Mr Ngure’s artistic ingenuity and jua kali style of inventiveness.