Fish Leather Earrings – Handcrafted in Kenya

Handcrafted from Nile perch leather. Women-led workshop, Lake Turkana, Kenya.

Earrings with an unusual material and an unusual story. Clean shape, bold colour — and yes, you will get noticed when you wear them. The material? Fish leather. Handcrafted from Nile perch skin at the edge of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya.

When we first held these in our hands, it was the texture that got us. That natural scale pattern — there’s nothing quite like it.

The story they carry is one of crisis and a new beginning. The Turkana region was hit hard by recurring droughts. With the help of humanitarian programmes, communities made the shift from herding to fishing — learning to work with the lake that had always been there. The fish skin that came with it was waste. Ira and James Ambani saw something else in it — learned the craft, refined it, and built a workshop that today employs around twenty people, most of them women.

We wear these ourselves. And we find them cooler than a thousand designer accessories — not because of what they cost, but because of what they carry.

Each pair is unique. Same shape, same hook — but the texture, the grain, the exact tone always a little different. That’s not a flaw. That’s the point.