Jomo Tariku was in ninth grade when his father signed him and his brother up to work in a small furniture making shop near their home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The experience, originally meant to keep the two boys out of trouble during the summer, sparked a lifelong passion for the craft.

This passion first took him to the University of Kansas to study industrial design in the late ’80s, and later to a small studio in Alexandria, Virginia, for nearly a decade. After a brief stint in data visualization at the World Bank, he’s now back to designing furniture inspired by his African roots, with pieces in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and National Museum of African American History and Culture, among others.

Diversity in the design industry has been a major focus for Tariku throughout his winding career. Noticing a lack of African work in major design publications, he decided to write his college thesis on a new line of African furniture. “I would go through these magazines—a decent amount of them were coming from Europe—and I noticed one thing: There were no designers from the continent [of Africa] in any of them,” he tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “There were no design ideas, design languages from Black people. And I kept on saying, ‘Why is this?’”

Thirty years later, Tariku worked to answer that question with a data-driven project examining how many Black designers top furniture companies collaborate with. In all of the 150 companies he surveyed, only a third of a percent of their branded collections were with Black designers. While he has noticed change since publishing the study in 2020, there’s still work to be done. “I want people to understand there’s a large Black creative community doing fantastic work,” he says. “Think outside the box. Do other things. Look for other designers, and don’t remember us only when Black History Month comes around and you make your ‘50 designers you should know about’—[with] no in-depth look into any of them—and run away for the rest of the year.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Tariku talks about why branding is so important in design, why he’s getting into wallpaper and other categories, and what it will take to truly make design a global language.

Crucial insight: Tariku discusses how instrumental the Black Artists + Designers Guild has been for his career, offering mentoring, community and the chance to work alongside interior designers. He urges other designers, especially minorities, to find a community of their own to bounce ideas off of and share experiences. “Getting together and talking about your problems within a family like the Guild and other other entities can help you understand [the industry], because as Black designers, some of us never had this opportunity [to gain those insights and experiences],” he says.

Key quote: “Amazing ideas come from all over the world, and the industry is missing out specifically on these things. Regurgitating the same thing that we’ve seen for ages and bringing it back and redoing it again with some fine lines is not really introducing anything new within the global language. We’re focused on very Western-specific design languages, and that is it. As a Black designer, I’m a consumer of everything design. I have nothing against other designers’ work—I just want everybody else who’s doing great work to be represented.”

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and Isla Porter. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

BOH editor in chief Kaitlin Petersen and host Dennis Scully discuss the biggest news in the design industry—including surging home insurance premiums and Etsy’s return to its artisan roots—as well as key business lessons from the 50 States Project. Later, designer Susan Wintersteen joins the show to talk about founding Savvy Giving by Design.

This episode is sponsored by Isla Porter. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.