When Temi Adeyemi took the helm of her family's Lagos-based textile business in 2015, it had 47 employees, one factory, and annual revenues of $12 million. The company made fabric. Good fabric, but fabric nonetheless.
Eleven years later, Textilia Pan-African Group operates in 14 countries, employs more than 8,000 people, and generated revenues of $380 million in 2025. It is the largest private employer in the West African textile sector and is preparing for what would be the most significant African consumer goods listing on the London Stock Exchange in over a decade.
Adeyemi, 43, has become one of the most closely watched executives on the continent — not just for the numbers, but for the method behind them.
The Strategy Nobody Believed In
In 2016, one year into her tenure, Adeyemi made the decision that would define the company's trajectory: she would stop trying to compete on price with Asian imports and instead build a brand.
The textile industry in West Africa was a commodities business. Fabric was fabric. Margins were thin. The conventional wisdom was that African manufacturers could not build the kind of premium positioning that would allow them to charge more.
"Everyone told me I was wrong," Adeyemi recalls. "They said African consumers won't pay a premium for local. They said our costs were too high. They said I needed to cut prices, not raise them."
She raised them.
The bet was on a thesis she had developed while studying at the London School of Economics: that a growing African middle class would pay more for products that reflected their identity and values, provided those products could demonstrate quality commensurate with the price.
"I wasn't selling fabric. I was selling pride of ownership for African-made goods. That's a different business."
The Expansion Playbook
The expansion beyond Nigeria followed a distinctive model. Rather than entering markets through acquisitions or joint ventures — the approaches favored by most multinationals — Adeyemi built from the ground up in each new country, hiring local leadership first and giving them significant operational autonomy.
"I never put a Nigerian in charge of a market outside Nigeria," she says. "The person running our Ghana business is Ghanaian. The person running our Côte d'Ivoire business is Ivorian. They understand their market in ways I never will."
This decentralized model has been both a competitive advantage and a management challenge. Central coordination — particularly around procurement, brand standards, and financial controls — took years to get right and required substantial investment in systems that most companies at Textilia's earlier stage would not have prioritized.
"We over-invested in infrastructure when we were still relatively small," Adeyemi acknowledges. "That was painful at the time. It's what made the later growth possible."
The London Listing
The planned $200 million London Stock Exchange listing — targeted for the first half of 2027 — would be the capstone of the Textilia story as Adeyemi has built it. But it is also the beginning of a new chapter she is notably more circumspect about discussing.
The proceeds, she says, will fund a push into East Africa — Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda — where Textilia currently has no presence. It will also fund the company's first technology investments: automated pattern-making, AI-driven inventory management, and what Adeyemi describes as a "digital fabric ecosystem" that she declines to elaborate on.
"There are people watching what we're doing. I don't like to tip my hand."
The listing was reportedly considered for the Nigerian Exchange Group, where Textilia would be a natural flagship. Adeyemi chose London deliberately.
"I need the capital markets access that London provides. I need the credibility that comes with a LSE listing in certain rooms where I'm still fighting to be taken seriously. And I need to be able to attract talent globally."
The last point is telling. For all of its growth, Textilia has struggled to attract senior financial and operational talent from outside the continent. Adeyemi frames the listing partly as a talent strategy: a publicly traded company with London-listed shares can offer equity compensation that is legible to international hires in a way that private shares in a Lagos holding company cannot.
The Executive
Adeyemi is direct, fast-moving, and — by the accounts of those who work with her — not always easy. Three of her last four chief financial officers have left within two years of joining, a pattern that she does not deny but frames as a function of the company outgrowing its executives faster than they can adapt.
"I need people who can grow at the speed we're growing. Most can't. That's not a criticism — it's just a reality."
She is also, notably, one of the very few women leading a company of this scale in the West African corporate landscape. She is deliberate about this fact, maintaining a mentorship network of over 200 women in African business and speaking publicly about the structural barriers that limit female advancement in pan-African commerce.
"It is better than it was. It is not good enough. Both of those things are true."
The listing will test whether the Textilia story — built on premium positioning, decentralized autonomy, and systematic patience — can survive the scrutiny of public markets and the quarterly earnings cycle that comes with them.
Adeyemi is, characteristically, unbothered.
"Companies that focus on quarterly results end up with quarterly companies. I'm building something else."