Founder Spotlight: Almah’s Manal Saleh

Manal Saleh’s (LinkedIn) fashion brand turns donated vintage clothing into contemporary designs, and all of its gains go back to the Clothing Bank. Almah, the sustainable label she co-founded, is built on fabric that reaches the Egyptian Clothing Bank but doesn’t meet the daily needs of the families it serves: classic, high-quality pieces from the 1950s and 1960s that are worth more reworked and sold, with the revenue paying for new clothes for more children.

Saleh graduated from Cairo University’s engineering faculty and worked in the field briefly before the charity sector took over. She went on to co-found three of Egypt’s largest NGOs: the Egyptian Food Bank, the Egyptian Healing Bank, and the Egyptian Clothing Bank. After years on their boards, she moved into a full-time executive role running operations at the Clothing Bank 10 years ago. “Most of my life has been in the charity sector, and I’ve been fully dedicated to operations since,” she tells EnterpriseAM.

The Clothing Bank goes beyond emergency relief to what Saleh calls “developmental clothing”: school uniforms and professional wear for people entering the job market. Donations come from households, factories, retailers, importers, and exporters. As donors’ trust deepened, rare family stock from the 1950s and 1960s began arriving. “The fabrics were excellent and classic, but by design they don’t meet the basic daily needs of the neediest families,” Saleh says. “Recycling them into art pieces would let us clothe far more children in new, practical clothes.”

The team sat down with The Clothing Bank’s marketing head to work out how to turn those fabrics into value, and a branding agency proposed the name Almah, derived from water. “Water is always there, and nature recycles it: it becomes vapor, then ice, then water again,” Saleh says. “It stands for something that won’t die and won’t be thrown away.” Youssre Abdelkader‏ joined as creative director, with an academic background in fashion, sustainability, and multi-use design.

Almah designs in reverse. Instead of sketching first and buying fabric after, the team sorts the available stock by color, fiber family, weave, and pattern, then designs. “We look at what’s in our inventory first and classify it, and after that we start designing,” Abdelkader‏ says. The hard parts: the source of a fabric is sometimes unknown, and designs have to be repeatable. Saleh says an evening dress can mean combining three or four blouses, “something no designer was taught to do.”

The market also had to catch up. “In 2019 and 2020 it was hard to convince anyone to pay a high price for a piece made from old clothes,” Saleh says. Friends who would never have bought secondhand now buy only recycled pieces. A 2023 appearance on Shark Tank was a harder sell: investors saw a handicraft hobby, not a business. Saleh and Abdelkader‏ took that as a challenge to prove recycling can scale.

That produced a three-tier structure. Two seasonal collections a year, spring/summer and fall/winter, each carry six high-end designs. An everyday line takes common pieces in the stock, such as shirts, blazers, or skirts, and makes small changes that allow recycling in under a day, Abdelkader‏ says. The offcuts feed an accessories line, so nothing goes to waste. This year, the team is adding machine learning models to identify fabric type and its cotton or linen share, and to tell valuable material from cheap blends.

Almah’s presence abroad is limited for now to regional and international fairs in Finland and Saudi Arabia, in keeping with the administrative cycle of a charitable organization. Exports are part of the plan.