Nextberries Wants African Fashion to Remember

What if your clothes could tell their own story?

Not just who made them, but where they’ve been, who has owned them and whether they’re even the real thing.

That’s the idea behind RAC (Reviving Ancient Codes), a new collection from Nigerian creative technology company Nextberries.

When Atlanta Dream stars Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray stepped onto the orange carpet at the 2026 WNBA All-Star Weekend in Chicago wearing custom Nextberries looks, it could easily have been just another red carpet fashion moment. Instead, it became something much bigger. Beneath the garments was the company’s technology, allowing each piece to verify its authenticity, carry a record of ownership and unlock digital experiences with a simple tap. 

It’s a simple idea, but one that asks us to think differently about the things we own.

We’ve become used to tracking almost everything. We know where our food delivery is, we can follow a package across continents and our phones remember more about our lives than we do. Clothes, though, are different. Once you buy them, their story depends entirely on memory. If they’re passed on, sold or gifted, that history is usually lost.

Nextberries believes  it doesn’t have to be.

With RAC, the company is introducing what it calls Connected Products. Every garment comes with a digital passport powered by its platform, Realm. Tap your phone against the piece and you can confirm it’s authentic, see where it came from, keep track of ownership and access digital experiences connected to it. The garment stays the same. It’s the story attached to it that changes.

That idea feels especially relevant now. Counterfeits remain a problem, while resale and vintage fashion continue to grow. At the same time, sustainability has pushed more people to think about buying fewer clothes and keeping them for longer. A digital identity doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it does make it easier to trust what you’re buying and preserve a garment’s history as it moves from one owner to another.

In that sense, RAC isn’t simply about making clothes that last. It’s about making clothes whose stories last too. The technology may be new, but the idea behind it is centuries old. It simply gives digital life to the African tradition that has always valued authorship, identity and memory. 

The collection is built around handwoven Akwete cloth and draws on Nsibidi, one of Africa’s oldest indigenous writing systems. Both have long been tied to ideas of identity, authorship and preserving knowledge. Rather than treating those traditions as something to admire from a distance, Nextberries builds on them, using technology to continue ideas that have existed for generations.

RAC may be its first connected collection, but the ambition stretches much further. Nextberries sees the same technology being used for art, luxury goods, memorabilia and collectibles, physical objects whose value comes not only from what they are but from the stories attached to them.

The WNBA collaboration offered an early glimpse of that future. Since then, the company has also appeared on platforms including Coachella, New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week and SYKY Collective, quietly showing that technology developed by a Nigerian-founded company can find a place in some of the world’s biggest cultural conversations.

For years, discussions about African innovation have centred on catching up. Nextberries is making a different argument. Instead of waiting for someone else to define the future of connected products, it wants to help build it.