Jewellery

Jewellery as a product is made by people from every corner of the country. Kenya is a multicultural society in that we have the cultures or ethnic groups with diverse value and cultural systems. Understandably therefore the art of bead making or jewellery is not specific to a given community or region. Most jewellery has a combination of locally sourced natural materials and tends to have an authentic touch identical with the cultural background of the producers or artist. Kenya has an abundant wealth of raw materials. These range from semi precious stones, cow or goat bones, horn, wood, seeds, leather items, decorated items from kisii soapstone, imported African traditional beads from different African regions in the south, west, east and central Africa. Other materials used are copper, brass, and aluminum to mention but just a few. However, the items need to be made more neatly inorder to command ready sale in overseas market. There are some jewellery products whose products are synonymous with the product or community e.g. the Maasai community and particularly the Maasai woman present distinctly rich variety of their traditional fashion accessories. Responding to the market trends and tastes or market driven designs and demand is very crucial in the marketing of jewellery products. To this end therefore, all efforts are made to come up with creatively designed product by using semi precious and natural materials in making items like brooches, bangles, bracelets, hair ornaments, ear rings necklaces etc. The point is there is already a wide range of creatively and cultural rich design of jewellery products available from Kenya that sells at differentiated price depending on the raw materials used.