We’ve worked with Baadiye since the beginning, so he is used to bringing some of our more unusual and challenging tented designs to life.
Baadiye is an old hand in the tent making industry and we enjoy knowing that our camps are being handmade by Tanzanians, stitch by stitch. Baadiye made the very first Greystoke tents, complete with scalloped edges, back in the early nineties and has been sewing everything and anything that can be sown for Nomad ever since. Being closely involved in the safari business he has developed specialised skills and can sow a whole range of items, we particularly like our Nomad canvas picnic boxes.
Baadiye first picked up a needle and thread when a discarded magazine with a photo of a safari tent inside caught his eye. Curious and ambitions, he decided he would try and make one himself - why not. It may have taken him a couple of takes before he had something that resembled a tent, teaching himself entirely from scratch and relying solely on his magazine cutting, but Nomad was impressed with his work and bought his first commercial tent.
Twenty-something years on and all thanks to his tent-making ventures, Baadiye is now running properties across arusha that he has bought built and rents, and has secured a little plot of earth he calls his own, that he farms to grow food for him and his extended family.
Working for Nomad, he has enjoyed the freedom of brining some of his own ideas to the table and getting involved in tent designs, calling on his experience with the needle to see things that we sometimes miss. Often busy with his latest canvas creations, or dealing with off-season patches and repairs, you can find him sitting at his old manual singer under a large tree in the fresh air, his needle humming as yards of bulky canvas take shape into something habitable.