About Griot Market

Griot Market is a design and object studio founded by Didier Akinlabi Osias.

The name comes from the griot — the storyteller, historian, musician, and keeper of memory found across West African cultures. A griot carries culture forward through voice, rhythm, record, and ritual. Griot Market carries that spirit into objects.

What We Make

We make goods shaped by Black memory, craft, and everyday use.

Our work begins with the Afro-Atlantic world: Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and the many routes between them. Through clothing, books, images, accessories, and home objects, Griot Market treats design as a way to preserve stories, honor materials, and build new forms of cultural ownership.

What We're Building

The goal is not only to sell products, but to build an ecosystem.

Griot Market exists to produce, preserve, and redistribute — goods, records, images, objects, and texts. Every release is part of a larger practice: supporting craft, studying history, documenting culture, and creating objects that can live in the home, on the body, and in the archive.

Griot Market began in October 2020 with the first Griot book.

What started through publishing, photography, and printed matter has grown into a wider object practice: clothing, accessories, images, fragrance, home goods, and other forms of daily use.

The goal is a market in the old sense: a place where goods move, stories are exchanged, and culture is kept alive through intentional use.