Fashion

The Arab Brands Supporting Local Artisans and Communities

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 22, 2026

Fashion loves talking about craftsmanship, but there is a pretty significant difference between borrowing the aesthetics of a centuries-old craft and making sure the people who actually know how to practice it can continue earning a living from it. Across the Arab world, a growing number of brands have built their businesses around the latter.

For some, that means creating jobs for women who already possess generations of embroidery knowledge. For others, it means rebuilding demand around crafts disappearing under the weight of mass production, working with rural cooperatives, or investing money back into the communities supplying their raw materials. The approaches differ, and so does the scale, but the common thread is fairly simple: if a community contributes to building the brand, it should have a place in its success.

From Palestinian tatreez stitched in the West Bank to babouches handmade by a women’s cooperative in Morocco, here are the Arab brands making community part of the business model.

Salim Azzam

When Salim Azzam established his namesake label in 2016, fashion was a means of bringing work back to the community he grew up around in Lebanon’s Chouf mountains. The project began as a way to support local women who practiced embroidery, crochet and fabric manipulation, skills that had historically been passed through families while Lebanon’s once-thriving textile and artisanal industries steadily declined.

Today, the brand’s Chouf atelier employs more than 60 local embroiderers and artisans, with women translating Azzam’s illustrations and stories of mountain life into extraordinarily detailed handwork. The atelier also holds workshops and trains younger generations in traditional stitching techniques, giving knowledge once largely practiced inside the home an economic life outside of it.

Abadia

For Abadia, preserving Saudi craftsmanship has always required giving the people who practice it a reason to keep doing so. Co-founded by Shahd AlShehail and her aunt Naeema AlShehail, the Saudi ethical-luxury label works with artisans to incorporate regional techniques including sadu weaving and naqda, the delicate practice of pulling metallic threads through fabric, into contemporary clothing.

The relationship goes beyond borrowing traditional techniques for aesthetic purposes. In 2020, AlShehail said Abadia had worked with around 45 traditional artisans, largely women in Saudi Arabia’s Al-Qassim region, helping increase their income by 40 percent. Many were older women who had stopped passing their skills down because younger generations saw little economic incentive to learn them. Abadia’s answer has been to create a market for that knowledge, bringing Saudi craft into contemporary luxury while making its survival financially worthwhile for the people who hold it. The label has since expanded its network of highly trained artisans across Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, keeping craft preservation tied to the livelihoods of the people actually doing the preserving.

Zyne

A pair of Zyne shoes can take up to 36 hours to make, which tells you something about how far the Moroccan label sits from the logic of fast fashion. Zineb Britel and Laura Pujol launched the brand in 2016 with the idea of reworking the traditional Moroccan babouche for a contemporary wardrobe, but the people making those shoes have become equally central to the project.

Zyne partners with a Moroccan women’s cooperative and provides women from underserved communities with employment and training in skills including embroidery and beading. What began with five women has since grown to a team of 50 artisans, according to the brand. Every pair is designed and produced in Morocco, meaning the babouche’s reinvention is happening in the same country that gave it centuries of history in the first place.

Nöl Collective

With Nöl Collective, “Made in Palestine” is less a label sewn into a garment than the framework around the entire operation. The Palestinian fashion collective produces hyper-locally, working with family-run sewing workshops, artisan studios and women’s cooperatives across Palestine.

Those relationships bring together weaving, tatreez, tailoring, and other generational techniques across clothing and accessories, allowing a single collection to involve several parts of Palestine’s local production network. Nöl is particularly transparent about who makes its clothes and where they come from, pushing against a fashion system where production usually becomes anonymous the further down the supply chain you travel. Here, the supply chain is part of the story.

Sarah’s Bag

Founder Sarah Beydoun launched the Beirut label in 2000 after conducting research at Dar Al Amal, an NGO working with women at risk and female former prisoners in Lebanon. She subsequently created a business that could train and employ women she had encountered through that work.

More than two decades later, over 200 women, including prisoners, former prisoners, and women from underserved communities, produce the intricate embroidery, crochet, beading, and other handwork associated with the label. Sarah’s Bag also encourages experienced artisans to train women within their own towns and villages, extending employment beyond its immediate network. Since 2013, women working with the company while incarcerated have also received certificates documenting their training and work experience, which can help them seek employment after leaving prison.

Darzah

The nonprofit ethical fashion brand works with women artisans in the West Bank to produce clothing, shoes, bags, and homeware decorated with Palestinian tatreez, while leather for its products is sourced from a family-run manufacturer in Al-Khalil, or Hebron. The Fair Trade-certified social enterprise was created around providing Palestinian women with employment, training, and fair income, and purchases contribute to artisan salaries, job training, and employment programs. Its artisans can also choose to work from home, an important consideration for women facing transportation, geographic and family-care barriers. It makes Darzah an example of local production operating at several levels at once, from the person embroidering the piece to the businesses supplying what it is made from.

Taita Leila

Taita Leila began with a grandmother, although not in the sentimental fashion-brand-story way you might expect. Founder Noora Husseini named the Palestinian social enterprise after her grandmother Leila Hussein Fakhri Khalidi, author of The Art of Palestinian Embroidery, whose research documented the meanings and histories contained in Palestinian dress.

Husseini launched the project in 2015, eventually leaving her career as a chemical engineer to pursue it full-time. Women from villages, refugee camps and women’s societies in the West Bank hand-embroider the clothes, while the brand historically sourced fabrics from Palestinian factories and vendors as part of its commitment to local production. More recently, Taita Leila has also worked with displaced Palestinian women in Egypt, including women connected to businesses and creative practices uprooted from Gaza. The clothes may look contemporary, but the knowledge inside them stretches much further back.

Azza Fahmy

Long before Azza Fahmy became one of the Arab world’s most recognizable jewelry names, its founder was learning the trade from the source. In 1969, Fahmy became the first woman to apprentice with master craftsmen in Cairo’s Khan El Khalili, spending her evenings learning traditional jewelry-making techniques in the historic quarter. More than five decades later, every piece carrying her name is still handcrafted by local gold- and silversmiths in the brand’s Cairo workshop, where techniques including filigree continue to be practiced by hand.

That commitment eventually expanded beyond the company itself. In 2012, Fahmy established the nonprofit Azza Fahmy Foundation to preserve Egyptian handicrafts while giving underserved young Egyptians a viable route into the industry through vocational training, mentorship and career opportunities. The following year came the Design Studio by Azza Fahmy, building on jewelry workshops Fahmy had previously held in Aswan and teaching traditional techniques alongside contemporary design. The foundation has since developed programs around endangered crafts and worked with partners on initiatives such as Jewellery of Aswan, which trains young men and women in Aswan in jewelry-making and beadwork.

Doum

For Moroccan label Doum, the social project became large enough to become an organization of its own. Mother-daughter duo Yasmine Erguibi and Samira Madrane founded the accessories brand in 2018, building collections around natural fibers, basketry, embroidery, and leatherwork. A year later, they established the Doum for Women cooperative.

Based around Marrakech, the women’s basketry cooperative now brings together more than 200 rural women, according to Doum, with the aim of providing stable income and greater financial independence through artisanal work. In January 2021, Doum for Women became the first basketry cooperative in Morocco audited and recognized by Sedex for social compliance. The raffia and palm-fiber bags might be what customers encounter first, but behind them sits a much larger employment project.

Orient 499

There are very few corners of Lebanese craft that Orient 499 has not touched. Over more than 18 years, the Beirut-born lifestyle house has worked with glassblowers, coppersmiths, soap makers, carpenters, embroiderers, couturiers, and other craftspeople across Lebanon and the wider Levant.

The company says it directly and indirectly employs more than 200 artisans, bringing techniques such as Tareq embroidery from Baalbeck, copperwork from Tripoli, and glassblowing from southern Lebanon into contemporary fashion, furniture, and homeware. That breadth is important because conversations about endangered regional craftsmanship can become overly fixated on embroidery. Sometimes cultural preservation looks like a dress. Sometimes it looks like keeping a coppersmith in business.

Kotn

Kotn approaches community investment from a different end of fashion’s supply chain. The company built its business around Egyptian cotton and relationships with the farming communities growing it, eventually discovering that access to education was among the communities’ most pressing needs.

That led to the creation of the ABCs Project. Working with the Egyptian nonprofit Misr El Kheir Foundation, Kotn began directing a portion of proceeds from every order toward school infrastructure and operations in rural cotton-growing communities, covering expenses including books, furniture, water, electricity, teacher training and salaries. The first school opened in Kafr El-Sheikh in 2017, followed by additional schools in cotton-growing villages. It is a useful expansion of what “giving back” can mean in fashion, because the people who grow the material are every bit as much a part of making a garment as the people who eventually cut and sew it.

Suez Studio

For Egyptian-Iraqi designer Serag Elmeleigy, looking to the past has increasingly meant working with the people keeping it alive. Through his London-based label Suez Studio, Elmeleigy has brought regional craft into streetwear, most notably through khayamiya, Egypt’s centuries-old tradition of hand-stitched appliqué historically associated with tentmaking. For the brand’s Common Thread collection, Suez sourced both original hand-stitched khayamiya and printed panels directly from artisans on Cairo’s Khayamiya Street.

Suez has also partnered with Threads of Hope Cairo, the social enterprise that trains and provides sustainable employment to marginalized Egyptian women as well as refugee and migrant women. Their hand embroidery, appliqué and ajour stitching appeared across the label’s Desired Paths collection, bringing skills practiced in Cairo into a contemporary streetwear context

OSOUL

OSOUL takes its name from the Arabic word for “roots,” which makes sense for a label built around bringing Moroccan craftsmanship into an everyday wardrobe. Founded by Kenza Naguib Jaidi and operating between Morocco and the UAE, the brand works with skilled artisans across Morocco to produce its size-free pieces by hand, pairing traditional techniques with contemporary, easy-to-wear silhouettes. Production is intentionally kept small, with garments made in limited quantities using luxury fabrics as part of the brand’s commitment to slower, more considered fashion. For OSOUL, keeping Moroccan craft in circulation means giving it a life beyond the ceremonial or nostalgic, placing the work of local makers into clothes designed to be worn every day.

Yassmin Saleh

For sisters Yassmin and Farah Saleh, Beirut provides both the inspiration and the hands that bring their collections to life. Raised in Abu Dhabi before returning to Lebanon, the pair now operate their label from the heart of the capital, where each collection is designed and produced with local craftspeople and artisans. The sisters prioritize Lebanese suppliers and maintain long-term relationships with the makers they work with, treating production as an ongoing exchange of skills and ideas rather than simply handing over a design to be executed. The approach keeps the label’s production within Lebanon while giving local craftsmanship room to evolve alongside the clothes themselves. For a brand whose collections draw so heavily from Beirut’s women, streets and everyday life, keeping the people who make them part of that same ecosystem feels particularly fitting.

KAĪYA

KAĪYA began in Beirut in 2024, during a period when launching a fashion label in Lebanon was hardly the obvious thing to do. Founded by activist Lana El Khalil, the brand was conceived around a slower model of production, working with what already exists while creating paid opportunities for the people whose craft goes into each piece. Rather than producing new textiles for every collection, KAĪYA starts with luxury deadstock that might otherwise end up in landfill and reworks it into new garments. Production is carried out directly with artisans, including makers from refugee and Indigenous communities, with the aim of creating steady income through craftsmanship.

The Arab Brands Supporting Local Artisans and Communities

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