Guide
Buying an aso-oke from an Instagram seller: what a DM gives you, and what it takes away
Bazin · 15 November 2026
A stall outside a market, a seamstress posting new works, a relative of a weaver selling what came out of the loom last week: a great deal of genuine aso-oke, adire and kente moves through direct messages, and a good part of it is honestly described by people who know the cloth. The problem with the channel is not that the sellers are worse. It is that a DM is a conversation, and a conversation is not a record.
The four things a private sale does not keep
- A specification you can reopen. In a chat, the measurements are a number someone typed on a phone, next to a photo of a different piece. If the wrapper does not tie, the sentence that described it is somewhere in the thread.
- A price held by somebody other than the seller. A bank transfer, a mobile-money payment or a link sent in a chat sends the money to the person who also holds the garment. There is no moment at which a third party asks you whether it arrived.
- A way to escalate that is not “argue with them”. A marketplace dispute is answered by a person whose job is to read the file. A chat dispute is answered by the other person in the chat.
- A reason for the seller to be careful. On a shelf, a seller's next listing depends on the record of this one. A private account that has sold a hundred outfits has a hundred conversations, and no public history a buyer can read before paying.
If you are going to buy in a chat anyway
- Ask for the measurements flat, in centimetres, on the garment itself — bust or waist and length, not “fits a UK 12”.
- Ask which pieces are in the sale: wrapper, blouse, head tie, shawl. A photograph of a finished look often contains three items, one of which is on loan.
- Ask what the cloth is: aso-oke, etu, sanyan, adire, ankara print. The name is the difference between a hand-woven strip cloth and a machine print of the same pattern.
- Ask when it posts and from which country, and hold your own date back rather than trusting theirs.
- Keep every message in one thread, and save the photographs — outside a platform that is the whole of your file.
What a shelf adds, in one sentence
A listing is a conversation that got written down before the money moved: the condition declared in words, the defects as a list, at least one measurement in centimetres, the ship-from country, the preparation time, and the payment held until the buyer says the piece is right.