The tailors of Hamar Weyne: cloth, credit and a returning customer base
Imported cloth, a repairable machine and informal credit — the trade still runs on all three.
The workshops in the old commercial quarter run on the same three inputs they always have: imported cloth, a machine that can be repaired locally, and credit extended between people who know each other.
Cloth arrives by sea, so the exchange rate and the port schedule reach the workshop before they reach any statistic. A delayed consignment is a week without work.
Credit is informal and short. Cloth is taken on trust and paid for after the garment is sold, which makes the whole trade sensitive to a single customer failing to pay.
What has changed is the customer base rather than the craft: returning residents and a growing salaried class order differently from the trade that sustained these shops a decade ago.