Meet Reem Hamed, founder of Ramla

Reem Hamed builds her luxury fashion collections out of the leather that Egyptian factories don’t ship abroad. She goes to the export tanneries herself, asks for the offcuts from the Grade A hides earmarked for foreign buyers, and turns what’s left into shoes and accessories. It isn’t scalable, but it’s as close as you can get to what full-stack Egyptian manufacturing actually looks like at this scale.

Hamed is one of the few Egyptian artisanal luxury brand founders who manufacture their full product line in Egypt, the A-Z tier that the rest of this series has documented as the hardest and rarest position in the local wave. Ramla, which she launched in 2017 and runs as founder and creative director, is caught between the brand Hamed wants to build and what the country’s supply chain allows.

Hamed studied architecture in Cairo until the 2011 revolution disrupted her studies. She then moved to Florence for a bachelor’s in interior and architectural design, graduating in 2015. A master’s in luxury business at the Salvatore Ferragamo School followed, with highest honors, along with an informal apprenticeship at a friend’s bespoke men’s shoe workshop, where she learned the leather trade from the bench up. She returned to Cairo and took a job in interior design. “Deep inside, I knew I wanted to create a product that was wholeheartedly Egyptian, had a story to tell, and was crafted with Egyptian hands,” she tells EnterpriseAM.

Ramla launched as an experiment. Thirty-six pieces, no expectations. A former Kuwaiti classmate invited her to do a pop-up in Kuwait as her first commercial outing. That collaboration produced the first sales and the first proof that the concept had a market beyond friends and family. Gulf retailer relationships followed, though slowly. Hamed describes sending “thousands of emails” to specific stores before any wrote back.

The operating reality now is defined by the supply constraint. High-quality leather is difficult to source consistently in the domestic market, so Hamed built the brand around factory offcuts from exporters of the best material. The upside is a sustainability story: nothing gets thrown away, and the brand works with women artisans across Egypt for the craftsmanship. The downside is that Ramla can’t buy in bulk or restock a bestseller reliably and can’t plan a collection without knowing whether the fabric will be there when it’s time to produce.

“Consistency is key so we can offer high quality, but I am always afraid — will I find this fabric again?” Hamed tells us. “You can’t just buy in bulk; cashflow isn’t the best.”

She can control the design side. The rest — financials, marketing, distribution, and PR — she has taught herself over the 10 years since Ramla launched. Whether the leftover-leather model is the ceiling of what a genuinely Made-in-Egypt luxury brand can be, or the foundation of something that eventually scales, is what the rest of this series is trying to answer.