Meet the Founder: Inca & Co.’s Mostafa Korany

When Mostafa Korany looked at the Egyptian home textiles market in 2012, he saw a three-way split with a missing middle. “The market was split between cheap imports from China, very expensive French or English brands, and traditional local brands,” he tells EnterpriseAM. “There was nothing in the middle — affordable yet design-led.” Inca & Co., the textiles and home furnishings brand he co-founded with Mostafa El Nahawy in 2014, has spent 10 years building that middle tier. Along the way, Inca has shifted most of its production from imported to local.

The idea started in Marylebone: Korany was completing his business degree in London, living on Marylebone High Street above the British textiles brand Designers Guild. “It made me wonder why we didn’t have an Egyptian home textiles brand that could go global,” he tells EnterpriseAM. As a side hustle while studying, he and El Nahawy started making bean bags with silk-screen print fabrics, selling them out of a friend’s garage in Cairo.

Korany returned to Egypt in 2011 after a master’s in supply chain and did six months at the family’s textile manufacturing and trading business, Korany Brothers. He calls it the worst six months of his life. He wanted to build a company driven by art and design — a different vision. “I told my father, ‘Give me six months to figure out something on my own. If it works, you support me; if not, I’ll shut up and come back,’” Korany says. He was 22. El Nahawy, in a parallel family-textile situation, joined him.

The two spent time benchmarking global brands and mapping the domestic market before landing on the middle-tier positioning. The name came from their reading of the Inca civilization in Peru, and one in which the more prints and colors a person wore, the higher their social hierarchy. “That resonated with us because we wanted a very colorful brand,” Korany says. The target consumer was defined narrowly: the creative class who appreciate art and travel.

Inca launched in a 3-by-4 sqm space inside Pop-Up Shop in Downtown Katameya in late 2014. The first physical store followed in Zamalek in 2015. Today the brand runs four stores — in Zamalek, Downtown Katameya, District 5, and Arkan — plus e-commerce operations in Egypt and the UAE that now account for roughly 25% of the business. The product mix has moved with customer demand, from an 80% fabrics weighting at launch to a 50/50 split between fabrics and furniture today. The UAE business is growing, particularly on project-based work, with Morocco flagged as the next expansion market.

The production trajectory is where the Made in Egypt wave’s structural question lands most directly. Inca began by designing in Egypt and sourcing from India, Indonesia, and Spain: India for embroidery, Indonesia for materials like olefin for outdoor use, and Spain for capabilities Egyptian manufacturers didn’t have. Post-Covid and after the successive EGP devaluations, that math changed. Today 80% of Inca’s production is local; 20% remains imported. Third-party facilities handled manufacturing until the brand opened its own boutique factory in 2024.

The reference-point moment, Korany says, was manufacturing the Dior throws distributed to attendees at the 2022 Dior men’s show at the Pyramids. “If I can manufacture a product that would pass the strict quality inspection of LVMH, I can do anything.”

The operating challenge now, he says, is finding the balance between going mass-market and staying boutique. It’s the same tension every scaling homegrown brand in the series has flagged. For Inca, the middle tier it was built to occupy is the same tier it’s now trying to occupy at scale.