How homegrown fashion brands are building design capacity

Building design capacity as a homegrown brand right now means solving four operational questions the traditional fashion industry didn’t have to answer at scale. Where the designers come from, who runs creative direction as the brand grows, what to buy versus what to build in-house, and how to hire people whose creative sensibilities actually match. Two of the wave’s brands — Fufa and In Your Shoe (IYS) — are working through these questions in real time, from opposite starting points.

The talent pipeline

Neither of Egypt’s most prominent homegrown brand design leads came up through a traditional studio system. “I used to always doodle when I was younger,” Farah El Ashiry, founder of Fufa, tells EnterpriseAM. “Anytime I had a pencil and paper in front of me, I would start sketching — little dresses, tops or skirts, and some patterns from within.” She formalized the skill at the Italian Fashion Academy in 2010 at age 19. “They taught me how to sketch proper figures, how to draw gowns and make the textures look real, and how to paint the layers,” she recalls.

Amr “Shanwar” Badr (LinkedIn), head illustrator at IYS, took the opposite route. “I don’t come from a formal art background. I actually graduated in Business Administration from BUE,” he tells us. “I’m a self-taught illustrator who has developed a skill set over time on-the-job and through hands-on experience.”

Neither pathway is unusual for the wave. What connects them is that the design capacity that Egyptian homegrown brands rely on is being assembled brand-by-brand, without a shared institutional pipeline feeding into it.

Founder-led creative direction

At Fufa, El Ashiry still leads the initial design concept before her team takes over the finishing work. “I lead the initial design concept, and together with our team we decide on the final touches, the color combinations, and the craftsmanship,” she says. Scaling has changed how she thinks about collections. “I’m constantly thinking of new stuff, which isn’t entirely right because you need to keep what’s working alive. So I’m changing the way we’ve been releasing collections lately by focusing more on our [successes] and recreating those in a way that is in harmony with our collection.”

At IYS, creative autonomy is central to the brand’s evolution. Shortly after joining in 2020, Badr designed the entire winter collection himself — an experience that produced some of the company’s most recognizable ideas, including its mascot, Catchy. “A lot of our strongest and most memorable ideas came out of that period,” he says. “I realized that I do my best work when I’m given creative autonomy, and I think the founders recognized that too. Even as the company and departments have grown over time, I’ve still been trusted with the same level of creative freedom in the design process as I did on my first day here.”

The two brands land at similar operating models from different design approaches. Fufa’s process starts with sourcing materials — fabrics and textures shape how designs evolve. “When I’m building a new collection, what inspires me the most is sourcing good materials,” El Ashiry says. “From there, my designs start developing into ideas.” Seasonal palettes filter in, and Pinterest sits in the background: “Pinterest is every designer’s main source of inspiration, so your eye is just constantly fed with the global trends, which does, in a way, manipulate your design creation.”

IYS runs the other way. “We tend to lean more as trend-setters than trend-followers,” Badr says. “Of course, we research the market and stay aware of what’s happening in the industry, but ultimately we rely a lot on creating things that we personally find cool and interesting. Time and time again, that approach has proven to connect best with the audience.” What feeds that intuition is deliberately outside fashion. “Having a wide range of niche interests — whether it's skateboarding, gardening, BBQ culture, music, or art — naturally helps you create work that looks good without the need to chase trends.”

Build-or-buy

Both businesses use freelancers for specialized deliverables, and both keep design close to production in-house. El Ashiry draws the distinction operationally. “Certain capabilities can be learned and developed in-house, and others just need to be outsourced,” she says. “Having a good network of freelancers and building a good relationship with them is always key to getting good results without adding to your monthly payroll — sometimes all you need is one simple task which you know can be done much more efficiently by a talented freelance designer.”

But some roles have to stay in-house: “There are certain designers who need to be in the office to see the process, get ideas about the making, understand the technique, and deliver accordingly. These definitely need to be built and evolve from within,” El Ashiry adds.

At IYS, the in-house team is where the brand identity lives. “We’ve always preferred building a strong in-house creative team to maintain a consistent brand voice and creative identity,” Badr says. “Sure, we collaborate and experiment with other creatives on certain projects, but our own collections and core identity are handled in-house.”

Creative networks

Badr describes a hiring process that runs almost entirely through personal creative networks rather than formal channels. “I’ve usually recommended artists I’ve genuinely known through creative communities and shared interests rather than relying on traditional hiring channels,” he says. “One of the people I brought on board was a longtime friend I’ve known from the skateboarding scene who happens to have a solid artistic side and a wild sense of humor that perfectly fits the brand. I scheduled a meeting between them and the founders, and the rest is history.”

“Egypt has a strong and growing pool of creative and design talent. Over the years, the industry has evolved a lot, and there are many talented designers with unique approaches and strong technical abilities. The main challenge, in my opinion, isn’t necessarily finding talent — it’s finding the right fit between the creative individual and the brand’s identity, vision, and work culture. Talent on its own is important, but it also needs structure, direction, consistency, and the right environment to truly grow and create meaningful work,” Badr says.

The gap

El Ashiry names what she sees as the biggest structural gap. “Offer more business-related courses in design,” she says. “You can be an artist and have a wonderful talent but not know how to use that talent at all. My biggest struggle is not coming up with designs — it’s how to run a business based on design.”

That gap echoes what we reported earlier in this series — the “discovery problem” Egyptian designers face in finding the manufacturing capacity that already exists in the country. Both are variants of the same infrastructure question: Egypt has the design talent and production capacity, but not the connective tissue — schools, directories, professional-services networks — that turns individual creative capability into sector-scale infrastructure.

What’s next

Both El Ashiry and Badr point to the same fix. “I’d love to see more infrastructure for creatives — more galleries, creative hubs, workshops, and events where artists and designers can connect,” Badr says. “It would be amazing if that could extend beyond Cairo and be accessible across different cities in Egypt.” Whether the aggregators and mall developers will extend that logic upstream into design and business-education infrastructure is the specific watchpoint.