Sseko Designs fashions a footwear business, based in Portland and ...

Three months into her first post-college job -- a good one, with the global communications company Fleishman-Hillard -- Liz Forkin dumped her public-relations career in the round file and bought a plane ticket to Uganda.

She couldn't stomach life in the corporate churn, and figured traveling for four-plus months through one of the world's poorest countries might change her for the better.

What Forkin didn't foresee in 2008 was how she would change Uganda.

Today, she and her husband, Ben Bohannon, operate what they call their "not-just-for-profit" enterprise, Sseko Designs, Uganda's largest footwear exporter. It makes unusually versatile, handcrafted sandals sold through about 100 retailers and online globally. Profits pay for academically promising but financially stressed Ugandan women to attend college while boosting that east African country's turbulent economy.

Ultimately, the Bohannons hope Sseko -- pronounced say-ko and derived from the Lugandan word for laughter -- will help end the cycle of poverty prevalent in east Africa, particularly among women, and boost them toward professional careers and leadership roles.

On this side of the world, style setters have taken notice. ?

In 2009, when the company was scarcely a year old, design maven Martha Stewart included Sseko sandals in her holiday gift guide. By summer 2011, Redbook, Fitness, Shape and People Style magazines featured the strappy sandals that lace around feet and ankles in endlessly creative combinations.

Sseko Designs at a glance

WHAT: The company designs, manufactures and sells strappy women's sandals and handbags made by hand in Uganda.

OWNERS: Liz Forkin Bohannon and Ben Bohannon of Southeast Portland

COMPANY MISSION: Help Ugandan women afford college tuition; break the cycle of poverty there; use business for positive social change.

IN PORTLAND: Pie Footwear, 2916 N.E. Alberta St., sells Ssekos all year; Ecovibe Apparel, 921 N.W. Everett St., carries them spring through fall. Add it up and the Bohannons, both 26, were able to evolve beyond selling sandals from the back of their gray Honda Element, move from the Midwest to Portland about nine months ago, and set up Sseko's U.S. headquarters in a spartan, cinder-block office on Southeast Ankeny Street.

"We didn't know anything two years ago -- and now, look!," Forkin Bohannon says, beaming. "What if we can harness consumerism and capitalism ... and make it a force for positive social change? Why wouldn't we?"

***

That first day in Kampala, Uganda's capital, Forkin walked the hot, hilly city of more than 1.5 million and soaked it in. She'd chosen it because a friend worked in an orphanage there.

The place bustled like any rapidly growing urban center, but its contrasts took Forkin's breath away.

Outside luxury hotels and shiny office towers housing multinational corporations, she watched impoverished children beg. She saw the city's sprawling slums and learned about residents' desperate challenges. And she discovered how warm and generous Ugandans can be, even when they have little to give.

Kampala, she remembers thinking, felt as raw and unnerving as it did joyous and vibrant. She fell in love with it.

Forkin quickly put her University of Missouri undergrad and masters degrees in journalism to work reporting and writing a newsletter for Cornerstone Leadership Academy, which educates poor but gifted students from rural and war-torn areas, pointing them toward college if they're able to afford it. She was 22 and the volunteer job introduced her to all kinds of women close to her age.

That's when she spotted the gap: Young women graduated from the college-prep academy and had a nine-month gap before university classes started. Their task was to return to their rural villages, find work and save enough so they could afford college tuition. Trouble was, the jobs weren't there.

"We were losing these bright, talented women who never made it to university," she says.

Forkin wondered how to solve the dilemma.

She considered the course taken by many well-meaning westerners in Africa: Start a charity, maybe matching Ugandan students with U.S. women who would pay the college tuition.

A Ugandan friend suggested an alternative. Find the students work, the friend advised. Give them the chance to help themselves.

But what did Forkin, a woman of anti-materialistic, anti-establishment leanings, know about creating jobs? She'd ignored her father's suggestion to study business instead of journalism at Missouri.

She wondered what Ugandans could make that might interest the consumers she knew best, U.S. women.

And that, she says, is when a friend back home reminded her of the sandals Forkin had once modified when she wanted "flip-flops that wouldn't flop all the time." She'd spent $1.50 on a pair of gray rubber flips, added a few string loops to the footpads, slipped through rainbow-striped ribbon and tied it around her ankles.

Her fashionista friends loved them.

But how could she manufacture sandals -- or anything -- in Uganda? Who could supply leather? Rubber? Fabric for straps?

Every day for two weeks, Forkin-Bohannon recalls, she took a bus to the city center and trolled Kampala, hunting for suppliers. She found a sandal-making tutorial on YouTube and refined her rudimentary skills. She wrote a step-by-step manual, and finally approached Cornerstone Leadership Academy.

When she asked school administrators to point her toward three recent graduates struggling to raise money for college tuition, they introduced her to Mercy Ahurira, Mary Enyaru and Rebecca Lunkuse.

She taught them sandal making, delivered supplies and told them that if they committed to the project, she'd guarantee their first year's college tuition, around $15,000 total for all three women.

They got to work.

***

To say Forkin's parents in St. Louis weren't happy about her Ugandan journey in the first place might be an understatement. Her mother hid her passport in a cookie jar before relenting and returning it. Forkin promised she'd be home before Christmas 2008.

She was, and within days of her arrival, Ben Bohannon, the smart, adventurous, down-to-earth fellow she'd dated in college, asked Forkin to marry him.

She agreed ... as long as he was OK with a promise she'd made in Uganda to sell $15,000 worth of sandals, or raise that much cash somehow, to pay the first year's college tuition for three bright young women.

Forkin and her bridesmaids wore Sseko sandals with silvery silk straps when the couple married in May 2009 ... which gave her another idea, a custom line of wedding sandals.

By then, Forkin Bohannon had read "HTML for Dummies" and built Sseko what she recalls as a "horrible website." Sandal bases filled the closets of the couple's one-bedroom apartment and the straps -- in all sorts of colors and patterns -- hung from the shower rod. She was dumbfounded when orders arrived from customers she'd never met.

Sales ticked up.

By that June, she'd sold enough -- at about $45 a pair then -- to fulfill her promise of a year's college tuition.

When a Ugandan friend delivered the news, the stu"screamed and clapped and one literally fell off her chair," Forkin Bohannon says. "They were so grateful and so proud of themselves and of each other."

The obvious next step: transform Sseko from a 9-month project to a year-round business. She added three more students to the Ugandan work crew and crafted a business model focused on their needs.

In a country where half the population earns less than $38 a month and the average wage is about $60, Forkin Bohannon says, she pays $200 to $250 monthly. The company requires student employees to put 50 percent of their salary in a college-tuition fund. When they complete their nine-month obligation, Sseko matches 100 percent of their savings, making college possible.

All that sounds smooth as pie today, but there were bumps in the road ... like in November 2009, when Sseko suddenly and inexplicably was slammed with so many orders the stock ran out.

Martha Stewart's people had asked blogger Gabrielle Blair of designmom.com to compile a list of cool products for Stewart's gift guide.

"I remember seeing a photo of the sandals," Blair says, "and thinking they were really cute ... the story behind them was even better ... Sseko was a perfect fit."

The little-known sandals appeared in the gift guide between a Kindle electronic reader and items from Dean & Deluca, purveyor of fine food, wine and kitchenware.

Buzz about Sseko built.

***

Ben Bohannon quit his tech job to join his wife at Sseko, which now has 10 students and 20 permanent employees in Uganda, plus one in the United States. He's the numbers guy; she's the creative force and marketing whiz. Their business cards dub them "co-dreamers."

Their sandals sell online in North and South America, Australia, Asia and beyond. The sturdy rubber and leather bases cost about $47. Interchangeable straps in varied colors and fabrics run $8 to $13.

Sseko sold about 10,000 pairs in 2011.

Of the approximately 100 brick-and-mortar retailers stocking Ssekos, two are in Portland, where the couple settled recently without realizing it's a footwear hub. The city's socially engaged, creative community, they say, made it feel like a good place to land.

Ecovibe Apparel in the Pearl District sells Ssekos spring through fall, and Pie Footwear on Northeast Alberta Street carries them year-around.

Stacey Matney, co-owner with her husband, J.C., at Pie, first noticed Ssekos when a customer walked in wearing a pair. "We thought, 'Wow, that's a really cool idea.'"

Now, Ssekos are the only sandal brand her store carries in winter.

"It's helping girls. It's helping this young couple grow their business. It's a win-win."

The Sseko story also enticed Leonard Allen Jr., who with his wife, Andrea, owns Ecovibe. He likes that customers with smartphones can scan a point-of-purchase card and digitally link to a YouTube video explaining the myriad ways Sseko straps can tie.

"Their marketing concept is fantastic," Allen says. "It's a great, fun sandal you can interchange. That seems to resonate with the ladies ...

"But it's the story -- that they're really in tune to helping others ... These guys really have their finger on the pulse of what's right."

Forkin Bohannon says she and her husband don't mind that they still live frugally, "like college students." They put nearly every bit of profit into the company.

"We work together," Forkin Bohannon says, "We get to do what we're so freakishly, undeniably passionate about. And we get to go to Uganda every year."

That's where they're headed this month. They'll meet and train their newest "class" of college-bound women employees, continue forging relationships with suppliers -- all from east Africa -- and work on new product concepts to add to the sandals and now handbags Sseko makes.

"We're passionate about telling a new story about Africa," Forkin Bohannon says. "It's not all AIDS, disease, poverty and war, but change and success."

The proof: Mercy Ahurira, one of Sseko's first three employees and a computer engineering student, is expected, come May, to be the first from the project-turned-business to graduate from college.

- Katy Muldoon; twitter.com/katymuldoon

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/O/index.ssf/2012/01/sseko_designs_fashions_a_footw.html

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