By Sunday Ani
The chief executive officer of a fashion designing, training and recruiting agency in Ilupeju, Lagos State, Lukman Akinwade, has invented a set of tools that would replace the use of free hand cutting of clothes by tailors, thereby making their job easier and more accurate.
Akinwade, 41, by this latest breakthrough in fashion designing tools, has just corroborated the saying that necessity is the mother of invention, and Nigeria is richly blessed with talents.
Christened, Lukenor Joga Pattern Tools, but simply known as Cutting Made Easy, the invention, launched on January 13, is like a set of rulers. With it, according to the inventor, a lot of tailors who engage in free-hand cutting would now create patterns and finish their works with accuracy, unlike what obtains with the free hand cut, where many fashion designers find it difficult to create patterns, especially when it comes to making female dresses.
“Pattern drafting is where we are now heading to in fashion designing. If you want to be accurate and good at what you do, you must ensure that you employ pattern drafting to be accurate because that is where the world is now moving to,” he said.
Akinwade, who has spent over three decades in tailoring, having started learning the ropes from his father at the age of nine, said he was moved to think out of the box and develop tools that would make cutting easy and exact. He said many of his apprentices, particularly members of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), who spend only one year to learn tailoring in his agency, always find it difficult to create patterns.
“I have been in tailoring for over three decades. I inherited it from my father, Young Akin De Tailor. I have been training people in tailoring and I discovered that it takes them a long time before they catch up with the free hand cutting. I would do sketches for them but they would find it difficult to cope. So, I started racking my brain for a solution, until I came up with this invention. Actually, it took me a couple of years before I got it.
“Even the NYSC members, who come here for their one-year compulsory national service, find it difficult, at the end of the programme, to draw out the breasts cup, corset blouse, princess and all that. But, with these tools, once you place it on the cloth, and follow the rules of proportion with the use of your pen to trace out the ruler, you will get the perfect body shape of any kind of dress or outfit,” he said.
On how much it cost him to invent the tool, he said he spent over N4 million on it.
A beneficiary of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ‘Cash Transfer,’ which was supported by the Japanese Government, Akinwade said the grant helped him to complete the invention, and equally expand his business. The cash transfer programme was an initiative of the UNDP with support from Japan to help Nigerians whose businesses were affected by the COVID-19 lockdown.
“I understand that some people used the UNDP grants to repay loans, others used theirs to pay rents and solve other family problems, but I used part of the money to do the graphic design of my invention. I thank the UNDP and the Japanese government for the assistance. However, I still need more financial aid to procure the machines that produce the tools,” he said.
Although he has patented Luknor Joga Pattern Tools, Akinwande lamented that he still did not have the machine to produce the tools because it was very expensive. He, therefore, appealed to well-meaning organisations, agencies and individuals to assist him in that regard.
“It takes a lot before you can produce six or 10 of these tools, and it costs a lot, but there is a machine that is majorly for it. It is the plastic screen printing machine and it costs about N18 million, excluding the installation fees. Now, we just do the design and take it to where we print it out manually with our normal screen printing, called mesh,” he said.
He noted that, having launched the tool, his mission now is to sell it to people across the world because it would help anybody interested in fashion designing to achieve his/her ambitions in the sector: “We want to be a premier fashion agency that will use these tools to train a lot of people, who would either work for themselves or get recruited into our fashion house. We have the manual and also the video to watch to understand properly how to use it,” he added.