Firstly, Happy New Year to you and your family, wherever you may be in the world.
What is the role of a company in 2024?
When I started working on the Culture Dealer all I wanted to do was showcase how amazing modern African art was.
The Nigerian proverb T-shirts were an attempt to make something about “what I know” and stay very much within the safe space of my own culture.
The swim collections (Love is Bright. Life is Blue and Masks are Everywhere) were a design study that I loved so much that I just put it out there.
The Limited Edition Art Prints are my love letter to my original purpose of my online store and just showcasing beautiful art by fantastic artists from the diaspora.
Recently, I have been thinking about what role should The Culture Dealer play apart from serving our customers, paying our suppliers and supporting and enabling our wonderful artists.
Within business circles all the talk has been around the phrase creating stakeholder value. Regulators have utilised the language of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and latterly environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks to try to describe business and corporate activity that cuts with the grain of society as opposed to a separate and distinct activity with its own selfish purpose.
This leads me to ask what is the Culture Dealer doing for ‘society’?
My answer was not enough.
So in 2024/2025 The Culture Dealer will be contributing to a better society.
At some point either this year or the beginning of the next - there will be a General Election in the UK. It is widely known that young people do not participate in elections so my goal will be supporting the charity My Life My Say who has the very simple mission of encouraging every young person to vote.
In order to support our activity in this area we have already launched a store on TikTok which only sells the items which support this campaign. We will also be bringing these items to the store here.
20% of all the profits made will be donated to My Life My Say to support their activities. The remaining profits will be invested in artists to produce more artwork (the aim is to have one design every month with each design covering a different political party until we run out of parties or ideas). We will also be paying to run some adverts - mainly on TikTok for now - promoting the collection but mostly encouraging people to vote.
If you like the sound of encouraging young people to vote but dislike the clothing feel free to go to the My Life My Say website and please donate.
If you are an artist from anywhere in the world (but particularly Africa or the African diaspora*) that has an idea for a great design email me here.
One more thing.
My Life My Say is a non-partisan charity which means that it does not support any political party.
This means for the duration of the campaign The Culture Dealer will not be supporting any political parties. AT ALL.
Notwithstanding this, we will be encouraging all of our artists to produce designs that are provocative and resonate with young people. All of the designs should promote and stimulate debate our hope is that the wearers will go out and encourage their families and friends to start political conversations and hopefully vote.
As always The Culture Dealer will be supporting Africans and those across the African diaspora as that is a value which is fundamental to our purpose.
* I interpret this widely as I try to be as inclusive as I can be.