For many people, cowries belong to the past. They sit inside old family stories, appear in cultural photographs, and carry meanings tied to wealth, spirituality, protection, femininity, and African identity.

Today, we feature the amazing Bolawole Oluwanifemi Oluwatomiwa, the founder and creative director of OhMyCowries, a brand that is reimagining cowries as modern African fashion pieces. For her, cowries were never just relics of history. They became a language, a business, and a way to make African culture look exquisite on the global stage.

What makes her journey special is that it did not begin with a perfect business plan. It began with a moment of realignment, a setback that pushed her into discovering what would later become one of the most defining parts of her life and work.

Let’s hear from Oluwanifemi, the founder and creative director of OhMyCowries.

Before OhMyCowries became a brand, Oluwanifemi was a young woman trying to find her way after a major change in her life. She had been in medical school, studying to become a doctor, but that path did not go as planned.

For many people, that kind of moment can feel like failure, confusion, or the collapse of a carefully planned future, but she chose to do something different with it.

“I did fail out of medical school,” she said. “And that was when I discovered, I had already discovered my love for cowries.”

While she was still in school, she had seen cowries on someone and was immediately drawn to them. She went to the market, bought some cowries, and made her first pieces: a waist piece and a bracelet.

She also shared that she is a self-taught cowrie artist. She learned by trying, making, loosening, and remaking her pieces until they looked the way she wanted. At the time, she did not have the full picture of what the brand would become, but she knew she had to begin.

“I actually wanted to start a brand, but I didn’t really have the full idea of what I wanted to do,” she said. “I just knew that I had to start.”

That decision became OhMyCowries.

There are many ways to start a fashion or accessories brand. Some people begin with fabric. Some begin with beads, leather, crystals, gold, silver, or rare stones. Oluwanifemi chose cowries.

She admits that when she started, she did not fully understand the depth of what cowries represented. She simply loved how they looked. What helped was her background. She grew up in what she describes as a pro-African household, so African symbols were never strange or frightening to her.

“I grew up in a very pro-African household, so I was never averse or scared of anything African,” she said. “We never demonized African things.”

As she learned more, her attraction to cowries became deeper. She began to understand their beauty, history, and cultural weight. For her, cowries became one of the strongest visual symbols of African identity.

“There’s no way in the world you go to and see someone with cowries that you would not immediately think about Africa,” she said.

That is what makes OhMyCowries powerful as a brand. It is not just selling accessories. It is building from a symbol people already understand emotionally, historically, and culturally. The work is not to make cowries African. They already are. The work is to make people see them again.

Oluwanifemi admits that the early perception of her work could have been discouraging, especially because she had just left medical school and was now building a brand around cowries.

To some people, it did not look serious enough. It did not look like the kind of path someone should take after leaving medicine. But she had a strong conviction that this was something God had given her, and that conviction made her keep going.

She started small, teaching herself, testing ideas, and remaking pieces several times until she got them right. In the beginning, even her designs were not as bold as they are today.

“I was really still shy about it,” she said. “I didn’t want to be too out there.”

After a while, people began to notice.

People started discovering her work, asking questions, making requests, and pushing her to go bolder. They wanted more. They wanted pieces that carried the fullness of African culture without apology.

“I started meeting people that would push me to make more bold, authentic designs,” she said. “I need something bolder. Can you do this? Can you do this?”

That encouragement helped her see that what she was building had real potential. Her community did not only buy from her. They advised her, encouraged her, paid for her craft, and helped her understand that OhMyCowries could become more than a side project.

“I had people that were willing to pay for my crafts, advise me, encourage me,” she said.

At the beginning, one of the brand’s first taglines was “the urban African look.”

That phrase captures what OhMyCowries has always tried to do, which is to create pieces that are deeply African but not limited to traditional settings.

Oluwanifemi does not want cowries to be seen only as something for cultural festivals, costumes, or occasional traditional wear. She wants them to exist in everyday fashion, red carpet styling, weddings, creative shoots, and global conversations about African luxury.

“We were always in the headspace of creating pieces that people could wear every day,” she said. “Not just traditional pieces.”

With OhMyCowries, she is building heritage without fear, culture without limitation, and African identity that can stand beautifully anywhere in the world.

“I’m all about creating pieces that look elegant on a global stage,” she said. “Something that you can wear to a red carpet event, something that you can wear in your country, something that looks good to whoever sees it.”

Her approach is not to force modernity onto cowries. It is to lean into what they already represent and add creative expression around them.

“With cowries, you don’t really have to do too much to make them look African because they are already like the greatest symbol of African culture,” she said. “All we just had to do was add creative spins on everything.”

One of the most interesting parts of the OhMyCowries story is that Oluwanifemi did not learn the craft from a formal teacher.

She taught herself.

When she started around 2020, there were not many tutorials online on how to make cowrie pieces the way she imagined them. There were videos on beads, crystals, and other accessories, but cowries required a different understanding.

“This is not something I actually learned from anyone,” she said. “I practiced, I watched videos online.”

Cowries are not regular beads. They are shaped differently and do not simply allow thread to pass through in the same predictable way. She describes it as learning the “anatomy of the cowries,” and that knowledge only came from sitting with the material, experimenting, failing, loosening pieces, and remaking them again.

Sometimes she made one item six or seven times before she was satisfied.

“I knew how I wanted my pieces to look,” she said. “I was never satisfied until I got it right.”

This kind of stubbornness became an advantage. In a business built around handmade craft, the quality of the final piece depends heavily on patience, vision, and the willingness to keep improving until the work reflects what the artist sees in her mind.

As OhMyCowries grew, Oluwanifemi also had to learn the business side of creativity. Pricing, packaging, selling, positioning, and customer experience all became part of the work.

Looking back, she laughs at how little she used to charge in the beginning.

“Sometimes when I look back at my old prices, I’m like, wow, how was I charging that little?” she said.

But that is a common journey for many creatives. In the beginning, it can be difficult to understand the true value of your work, especially when your product is handmade and your process is personal. Over time, the value changes because the skill improves, the quality of materials improves, the time becomes more valuable, and the brand itself begins to carry more weight.

“As you grow, you learn more about the true value of your craft,” she said.

For Oluwanifemi, pricing is not just about the physical cowries. It includes time, learning, technique, resources, design, packaging, and the years of quiet improvement behind each piece.

“You have to sit down with it,” she said. “You have to figure it out, and that takes time, it takes experience, it takes work.”

OhMyCowries has also had to solve a problem many customers may never think about: how do you package delicate, intricate, handmade African pieces so they can travel safely and still look beautiful when they arrive?

The brand now creates crowns, body pieces, skirts, jewellery, headpieces, and other intricate designs. Many of these pieces travel to places like the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and across Nigeria.

The challenge is not only to prevent damage. The packaging must also feel worthy of the product.

“We not only had to make them functional, we also had to make them aesthetically pleasing,” she said.

For example, with the Isis Crown, placing it carelessly in a box would make it bend and lose its form. So the brand had to find a way to support the shape, protect the piece, and still create an unboxing experience that felt beautiful.

This is where the business of craft becomes more serious. It is not enough for the product to look good in a photo. It must survive movement, shipping, handling, customer expectations, and still arrive with the same sense of value the buyer paid for.

While the handmade process came with its own challenges, Oluwanifemi says her biggest challenge was not the craft itself. It was people’s perception of cowries.

Some people were uncomfortable with them. Some associated cowries with fear, spirituality, or things they did not understand. Sometimes, she would make pieces for friends, and when they got home, their parents would ask them to return the pieces.

That kind of reaction showed her how much fear still existed around African symbols, but it did not stop her.

“I knew in my heart that this is what I was supposed to do because I feel like this is something that God gave me,” she said.

Her conviction helped her continue, even when people did not fully understand what she was building. In her own way, she was not just creating accessories. She was helping people see cowries differently.

For many modern creatives, social media is a sales channel. For Oluwanifemi, it is also an extension of her art.

She admits that consistency can be overwhelming, but she also understands how important visibility is in positioning her work. Her videos, concepts, and creative direction have helped people connect with her brand beyond the products.

“Creating on social media, putting myself out there is another form of expression for me,” she said. “It’s another form of bringing my ideas to life.”

This is another lesson for creatives building businesses today. The product matters, but so does the story around it. People want to understand the mind behind the brand, the process behind the piece, and the emotion behind the design.

For OhMyCowries, social media has helped transform cowries from something people may have misunderstood into something they want to wear, share, and celebrate.

“Alignment in anything in life is so important,” she said. “Once you find what works for you and you lean into it and you are so authentic in what works for you, I feel like that is the number one cheat code in life.”

One of the most meaningful moments in Oluwanifemi’s journey came when her work appeared in Adekunle Gold’s “Party No Dey Stop” music video.

For her, it was something she had prayed for and imagined before it happened.

She remembers watching music videos with a friend and imagining her cowrie pieces on the models. She would look at outfits and think about how much more powerful they would look with cowries.

“I literally prayed for it,” she said. “I envisioned it.”

When the opportunity finally came, she did not even know the project was for Adekunle Gold until the video was released. When she saw it, she was overwhelmed.

“I cried my eyes out,” she said.

That moment helped her see that OhMyCowries could belong on a global stage and still hold its own.

“That really showed me that, yes, this brand can be on the global stage and still shine so beautifully,” she said.

Since then, the brand has been part of other creative projects, pop-ups, exhibitions, music videos, and even a runway show in Texas, USA. For a brand built from cowries, conviction, and self-taught craft, those moments are proof of what can happen when cultural work is treated with excellence.

When asked what advice she would give to African creatives trying to build a sustainable business from their art, culture, or personal craft, Oluwanifemi returns to one word: authenticity.

“Don’t try to copy anybody,” she said. “Be yourself, be authentic, be unapologetic about your craft.”

For her, copying places a creative several steps behind because the people being copied are already thinking about their next idea. The better path is to find what is true to you and build from there.

She also believes love for the work matters deeply. She still feels joy when she sees her pieces on people. She still feels fulfilled when someone chooses her work for an important moment, like a wedding.

“I make designs that are authentically me,” she said. “I make designs that I really love, that speak to me as a person.”

Her advice is simple but powerful: make things you are proud of, stay consistent, believe in yourself, and keep going even when fear is present.

“Do it scared,” she said. “Just do it.”

OhMyCowries started with cowries, but Oluwanifemi’s vision is expanding.

The brand is already moving into African fabrics, textiles, statement pieces, and couture. She mentions mud cloth, different types of aso oke, jewellery, shoes, headpieces, and other expressions of African fashion.

“My cowries is going to be a fashion house,” she said.

That bigger vision is not only about making more products. It is about building a full African fashion world rooted in culture, craft, and imagination.

“We are bringing Africa to your doorstep,” she said. “You heard it here first.”

The statement is bold, but it fits the energy of the brand. OhMyCowries is no longer just about making cowrie jewellery. It is about creating a fashion language that can travel, stand out, and still point back to Africa.

Oluwanifemi’s story is a reminder that African culture does not have to remain in museums, family stories, or ceremonial spaces to be respected. It can be worn. It can be packaged. It can be sold. It can travel. It can sit on red carpets, appear in music videos, move across borders, and become part of how a new generation expresses identity.

OhMyCowries is proof that sometimes the material you need to build something powerful is already around you. The challenge is not always to find something new. Sometimes, it is to see what has always existed with new eyes.

For Bolawole Oluwanifemi Oluwatomiwa, the lesson is alignment. She found a symbol that already carried history, sat with it long enough to understand it, and built a brand that makes African culture feel bold, elegant, and alive again.

If you would like to connect with Oluwanifemi or explore her work, you can reach out to her here: 

More amazing stories are coming on THRIVE.

Till next time,

Team Thrive

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