I grew up pulled three ways at once. I could draw, I played football every day I could get a ball near my feet, and I was the kid who did biology homework for fun. None of the three ever won.

I came to the US in 2000 for school, following the medicine, and Philadelphia is where I landed and stayed. The other two came with me: pickup games in whatever park had space, sketches in the margins of everything. Somewhere along the way I married a Moroccan woman, and a North African household folded into the Ghanaian one I already carried.

The threads finally pulled in the same direction when I started designing World Cup jerseys for myself. Nobody commissioned them. I studied old kits and tried to work out why some crests said something while others only decorated the shirt. Art and football became one practice there, and once it was a practice I couldn't keep it on the pitch. A motif that belonged on a match jersey belonged on a hoodie too, or on joggers you'd wear to a hospital shift or a gallery opening.

The honest source list, before anyone tidies it into a brand paragraph: Kente. Adinkra. Nsibidi, the old ideographic script of the Cross River societies, which might be the clearest proof of the whole idea, since people actually wrote with it.

Next to those sit science fiction, engineering and medicine. Afrofuturism has always set an ancestral form inside a future that hasn't quite arrived. A circuit trace and a cloth pattern share a job, routing information through a physical structure without breaking it. And the eye that studies how a body's systems work is the same one that watches how a garment moves over a body.

Under all of it sits Anansi again, the bedtime version with no citation, a grandmother's voice that outlasted the night it was told in.

The Akan say se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi: it is not wrong to go back for what you forgot. You go back, you pick it up, and you keep walking.

Sankofa was the first fabric where I let myself go all the way back before moving forward at all. The Akan symbol is usually drawn as a bird with its head turned over its own back, reaching for an egg it left behind. I wanted to make the engineer's version of that bird.

So I went looking for where Africa's engineering record starts, and it starts well before most design conversations bother to check. Nok smelters in what is now central Nigeria were working iron more than two and a half thousand years ago. From around the 1200s the bronze casters of Benin were making lost-wax heads and plaques so fine that some European scholars who saw them centuries later refused to believe Africans had made them. In the 1300s, under Mansa Musa, Timbuktu was turning into a city of scholars and manuscripts. That is a technical record, and it's the one I was reaching back into.

The Kinetic Engine print is where it lands in 2026: gears, turbines and circuit-trace geometry in royal purple and burnt orange. I kept it away from the pale blue of server rooms on purpose. The aim was wearable engineering, the same impulse that built an iron furnace and cast a bronze head, pointed at a hoodie this time. In this version the ancestors are still at work. They've just changed jobs.

AnanseNova came from the same bedtime voice, pointed at a different memory. In the stories I grew up on, Anansi is always building something: spinning, trapping, bargaining, halfway through a construction. A web has structure. It radiates from a center in cells that come close to hexagonal, the shape nature keeps returning to in webs and in honeycomb.

I set that logic next to bògòlanfini, the mud-dyed cotton cloth of Mali, where every mark and grid line carries meaning and the vocabulary is handed down like a language. The two were already talking, mudcloth's disciplined grid on one side and the web radiating out on the other, with the hexagon sitting where they meet. The Igbo have a saying for that kind of shared ground: Egbe bere, ugo bere. Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch.

So the AnanseNova hive has mudcloth's earth-toned restraint and the web's routing, uneven and radiating, loose at the edges where a rigid tile would lock up. Nova is for the night it was spun in. A web made by firelight and a new star both start from whatever was already there in the dark.

N'Donso is the first print that leaves Akan country. Travel north and west from Accra into the Mande world of Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire and you meet the donso, the hunters' brotherhood. In Bambara, n means my, so the name reads my hunter. The donso knew the bush and its medicine, kept its songs, and walked out ahead so the people behind them knew the way. Nobody was born a donso. You learned your way in, under someone who had walked the road before you.

A hunter's shirt kept its own record, hung with amulets for protection and marked by the places it had been. I set it beside Kuba cloth, the raffia textiles of the Kasai in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, a long way south and a separate tradition. Kuba makers are known for breaking their own pattern on purpose, so a zigzag changes its mind halfway across a panel and a block won't match its neighbor. That's the same un-designing I describe in the repeat test below, done centuries before anyone called it a design problem.

N'Donso reads more like a map. The zigzag columns are the path, which bends the way real roads do. Linked rings are the brotherhood, each one holding the next. Nested triangles are the marks a hunter leaves to find his way home. Every N'Donso piece carries the same map, whatever colorway it's cut in.

The craft side is unglamorous, and it happens in stages I've never laid out before.

It starts with the source: an Adinkra symbol, the weave logic of a Kente strip, a Nsibidi mark, a mudcloth grid. I study it on its own terms before it goes near anything I'm designing, because the quickest way to disrespect a symbol is to skip understanding what it carries. Then I break it into its parts, the lines and the negative space and the proportions that make it that symbol and not a cousin of it. Only then does it go into Photoshop and After Effects, where I build the print layer by hand and test how a motif behaves when it repeats across a whole panel.

The repeat test is where most patterns fail first time. A motif that looks beautiful on its own turns stiff the moment it's tiled, every copy the same size, the same angle, the same distance from its neighbor. Fixing it is closer to un-designing. I break the rhythm so nothing lands on a fixed beat, and let the connecting line run through the whole composition rather than starting and stopping inside its own little box. The line itself stays hard-angled and deliberate while its route across the fabric wanders. Repeated marks shift in scale and rotation until no two look machine-made, and a small drift of hue moves across the piece the way dye lots vary from batch to batch. You won't notice any of it by name. You'll notice that the print looks remembered.

I'll use a tool like Gemini for a quick concept sketch now and then, the way you'd rough something out before the real drawing. The judgment calls stay with me: whether a line holds its discipline or goes loose, whether a drifting motif reads as handmade or just sloppy. A machine doesn't know why a mark descended from Nsibidi has to stay legible as a mark. I know because I grew up around marks like that before I had a word for them.

The fabric names follow the same discipline, and each one tracks the material rather than the garment. AsaseFlex is our polyester and elastane stretch knit, behind the leggings, sports bras, crop tops and polos. Asase is Twi for earth, after Asase Yaa, the Akan earth goddess of fertility and of the ground every harvest depends on. NsuKinetix, from nsu, water, is what the jerseys and AeroTanks are cut from. AkomaDrive, from akoma, heart, is the recycled brushed fleece in our track jackets, joggers and zip hoodies: one fabric, so a full tracksuit wears as one. OgyaSpark, from ogya, fire, is the bomber shell on our nation jackets. MframaShell, from mframa, wind, is the water-resistant windbreaker shell. AsaawaSoft, from asaawa, cotton, covers the cotton-led pieces: the stretch-cotton hoodies, the tees, the Adinkra fleece and the letterman. Each name pairs a word from home with the work the fabric does. “Recycled polyester” was never going to be a name.

Before anything ships it goes through one question, the same one every time: would I wear this? I'm still organizing pickup games, still sketching on the side, still thinking in half-remembered biology diagrams, so the test is literal. Would I put this on and walk into my actual week, whatever that week holds?

That question is most of the company. The fabric science, the proverbs, the hexagon, the gear trace and the software are the machinery that gets a piece close enough to pass it.