How a sneaker company hopes to jump-start Kenyan manufacturing
By Our Reporter
Nairobi -Kenya has long supplied the world with champions. It has not, until recently, supplied the world with shoes those champions might wear to victory. That gap is precisely the business opportunity Enda Sportswear set out to fill. The start-up is an experiment in whether a country famed for athletic excellence can translate cultural capital into industrial value.
Enda was cofounded by Navalayo Osembo-Ombati and Weldon Kennedy. Osembo-Ombati left a United Nations career in New York to build what she calls Africa’s first performance running shoe. The brand name, Enda, means “Go” in Swahili. Its first two models, the Iten and the Lapatet, were shaped by conversations with Kenya’s athletes and named in homage to the Rift Valley towns and languages that have produced generations of world-class runners.
The global running market is worth billions. For Kenya, which has produced a disproportionate share of endurance champions, the economics of remaining a supplier of talent while importing shoes makes little sense. “If you think of the global running industry, in shoes or apparel, it is almost a $50 billion industry, and we do not take in that at all,” Osembo-Ombati said in a CNN profile. Enda wants a share.
Product built in the image of champions
Enda’s product design is literal about provenance. The Iten is named after the small town in the Rift Valley where elite athletes train. Iten’s high altitude, roughly 8,000 feet above sea level, is commonly cited by coaches as one reason Kenya produces so many endurance athletes. Designers travelled to Iten to test prototypes and solicit feedback from runners who train there, including Joanne Cherop and Justin Lagat, who have been helping to refine the shoe.
The specifications reflect those conversations. The shoe has a light upper, a wider toe box to match a mid-foot strike and a 4 millimetre drop between heel and forefoot, a geometry the brand says suits Kenyan running styles. The aesthetic includes local motifs: triangle patterns from traditional fabrics, colours drawn from the Kenyan flag and a dozen sole grooves symbolising Independence Day, December 12. The design process involved multiple iterations; Enda worked through ten to 13 prototypes with Birdhaus, a New York studio with experience designing for Under Armour and Reebok.
Enda’s product development has won external recognition. The Lapatet won first prize in the Body and Mind category at ISPO Munich in 2019, the first time an African brand had taken that accolade. That award helped the company attract investors and expand production capacity.
Funding, distribution and the early economics
Enda launched after two crowdfunding campaigns. A successful Kickstarter raised about $128,000 and paid for the brand’s initial production run. Today the company sells primarily in overseas markets; roughly 90 percent of sales are in the United States, about 8 percent in Europe and a fraction in Kenya. That mix reflects three realities. One, the early customer base for premium, small-batch performance footwear tends to be in established running markets. Two, production costs in Kenya remain relatively high because some components are still imported. Three, the average Kenyan consumer lacks the purchasing power for a premium price point. Osembo-Ombati has said the company plans to launch a more affordable model for the domestic market, built entirely from local materials.
Enda currently makes roughly half of its components locally, and aims to bring the entire value chain onshore. Local assembly already takes place in Nairobi, and a partner factory has invested in machinery and training to increase local input. Technical skills remain scarce, particularly for tasks involving chemical mixing and specialised machinery. To close that gap the company brings in foreign expertise to train Kenyan technicians while building local capability.
Industrial strategy and policy friction
Enda’s ambitions expose an inconsistency in Kenya’s industrial policy. Export incentives are generous for foreign firms that locate within Export Processing Zones and own factories. Small, local manufacturers that outsource production or do not own a physical factory often do not qualify. The result is perverse: home-grown exporters can be disadvantaged relative to foreign entrants, because they pay upfront VAT on imported components and must wait for refunds. That ties up working capital at a time when start-ups need liquidity to scale.
Osembo-Ombati frames the problem plainly. “If I do not need to own a car to drive, then I should not need to own a factory to be recognised as a manufacturer,” she has said. Reforming export incentives and VAT administration to reflect modern manufacturing arrangements, including contract assembly and shared facilities, would reduce the cash-flow penalties facing local innovators.
Social impact and governance as business strategy
Enda is not only a product story. The company is certified as a B Corporation and as Climate Neutral. It donates two percent of revenue to community projects, supports programmes in slums and funds a centre for children with autism through the Enda Foundation. The business model layers social purpose on top of commercial strategy. That combination serves multiple functions: it builds brand authenticity, helps attract mission-driven talent, and creates a pipeline of local goodwill that can translate into regulatory and community support.
Enda also uses customer engagement to amplify impact. Buyers receive codes that let them vote on Kenyan start-ups and nonprofits that will receive grants as the company grows. That mechanism is part marketing, part ecosystem building; it channels consumer purchases toward a development dividend.
Intellectual property and brand protection
Design and branding matter in footwear, where look and performance command premiums and copycats proliferate. “Intellectual property is king,” Osembo-Ombati says. Enda has registered trademarks and design patents and treats IP as an insurance policy against copying. That stance highlights a broader need in Kenya: easier access to practical IP assistance, streamlined processes for registration and lower costs for small businesses trying to protect designs and trademarks.
Leveraging heritage to win customers
Enda’s competitive advantage is not technical novelty alone. It is the combination of authenticity, athlete input and narrative. The brand tells a simple story: the world’s best distance runners come from Kenya, so Kenya should be able to produce world-class shoes. That narrative resonates because it links product attributes to place. Enda’s founders say Kenyan icons such as David Rudisha, Moses Kiptanui, Mary Keitany and more recently the likes of Julius Yego, who taught himself javelin by watching YouTube, form a heritage that the brand can credibly claim.
That authenticity helps in crowded markets. Enda’s founders believe their underdog status and the provenance of their product are assets. “What is making me confident about Enda is our story,” Osembo-Ombati has said. “We are taking it back to the home of running.”
The scaling challenge
Scaling a footwear business from artisan batches to scale requires capital, suppliers and trade access. Enda currently imports some technical components, and improving domestic production of midsoles, outsoles and technical fabrics would reduce costs and create more local jobs. The path to scale also runs through quality systems and consistency. Athletics federations and elite teams demand high performance and reliability. Sponsoring Kenyan athletes and national teams could accelerate brand recognition and help Enda reach international buyers.
The company’s long-term aims are ambitious. Osembo-Ombati has stated a goal of putting Enda among the top three global sports brands, and of constructing a circular production system in which shoes are returned, dismantled and remade. Those goals are aspirational, but they also set a strategic horizon that helps align investors, partners and employees.
What Enda signals for Kenya’s industrial future
Enda is a useful case study for policymakers and investors. It demonstrates how cultural advantage can translate into industrial advantage, and how branding, IP and social purpose can be combined to build export brands from Africa. It also reveals frictions in policy and in supply chains that will need attention if manufacturing is to scale beyond assembly.
If Kenya wants to capture more value from its talent, the country needs more than champions on the track. It needs a manufacturing ecosystem that supports local innovators, accessible IP systems, financing instruments that recognise modern production models and a trade policy that rewards local value addition rather than merely physical ownership of factories.
Enda’s founder offers a pithy assessment of the venture’s wider purpose. “The more shoes we make, the more people we employ and the more revenue goes back to the community,” she says. The company will not change Kenyan industry alone, but it offers a blueprint: build products with local knowledge, protect those products with IP, align commercial incentives with social impact and press for policy that lowers the barriers faced by domestic manufacturers. If that formula scales, the gains will be economic, social and symbolic. Kenya could then be known not just for its champions but for the things those champions wear.
