About
Built so designers can buy local without the late-night Whatsapp hunt.
Nigerian fashion designers spend hours every week messaging strangers on Instagram, jumping between Balogun stalls, and chasing producers across Aba, Kano and Abeokuta. Threadline turns that scavenger hunt into a verified marketplace — and adds an AI mood-board layer so a designer can describe a vibe and instantly see the right fabric, the right producer, and the right RFQ ready to send.
Heritage-first
Every listing is tagged with provenance — Adire, Ankara, Aso-oke, Akwete, Kente, lace — so designers can search the way they think.
Verified producers
Threadline hand-verifies workshops across six Nigerian textile hubs, from Balogun in Lagos to the Akwete looms in Abia.
AI that explains itself
Our mood-board matcher returns a one-line reason for every fabric it suggests, plus a transparent score breakdown.
The textile hubs we cover
Six clusters — each with a different specialty, lead time, and economic story.
Lagos
Wax Ankara · Linen
Balogun Market scale plus modern resort weaves.
Aba
Akwete · Denim
Igbo handweave alongside an industrial mill belt.
Kano
Kembe cotton
Hausa cotton craft, Kofar Mata indigo pits.
Onitsha
Lace & cordlace
Imported lace finished and beaded locally.
Abeokuta
Adire indigo
Yoruba indigo resist, Itoku women-led co-ops.
Ibadan
Aso-oke · over-dye
Pit-loom weavers and natural-dye studios.
For producers
Run a workshop? Apply for verification.
We hand-verify every producer — visiting workshops, confirming provenance, and recording lead times — so designers can buy local without the late-night Whatsapp hunt. Free during the prototype.
Hackathon prototype
Built with Cursor AI in a single sprint
Cursor scaffolded the Next.js app, generated the seed catalog, authored the OpenAI vision matcher, and helped translate the brief into Yoruba/Igbo heritage tags. Read the source on GitHub.