KemetLeads
Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu
She turned old tyres and hand-spun cotton into a shoe brand — and kept the value in Addis Ababa.
The rise
Born in 1980 in Zenabwork, a poor district of Addis Ababa, to parents working at the local hospital, she took an accounting degree at Unity University in 2004 and, with a loan of 580,000 birr, hired five local artisans to make shoes from recycled tyres and hand-loomed cotton, after the traditional selate and barabasso sandals.
What they did
soleRebels grew into a brand sold by Whole Foods, Urban Outfitters and Amazon and in its own stores from Taiwan to Switzerland, reporting 125,000 pairs a year and some 300 employees by 2016, with artisan wages it puts at several times the Ethiopian minimum. The World Economic Forum made her a Young Global Leader in 2011; she later launched Garden of Coffee to retail Ethiopian coffee.
The full picture
The wage and job figures are the company's own, not independently audited. In 2012 she projected thirty stores and $25–40 million in revenue by 2018; by 2016 it counted outlets in nine countries. In 2021–22 customers complained online of paid orders undelivered for months, sometimes over a year, and of silence from the firm.
Why it matters
She built export value inside Ethiopia rather than shipping raw material out of it, paying artisans in a country whose usual industrial pitch is cheap labour — a widely cited counter-example to the extractive model.
“The best way to create prosperity is the tried and true method: create amazing products with service to match, pay your workers very well, and operate in a highly ethical and transparent manner.”