OUR FOUNDERS OF THE WEEK– Every Tuesday, Founder of the Week looks at how a successful member of Egypt’s startup community got their big break, asks about their experiences running a business, and gets their advice for budding entrepreneurs. Speaking to us this week: Hoda El Sherif (LinkedIn) and Sherif Tamim (LinkedIn), co-founders of Flavor Republic.

Our names are Hoda El Sherif and Sherif Tamim, and we’re the co-founders of Flavor Republic. Our career trajectories and the paths that made us meet each other and decide to launch a business together are very similar — we both studied Fine Arts here in Egypt, and upon graduating began taking a somewhat traditional career path before taking the plunge for Flavor Republic.

Hoda: I studied interior design, and started working at El Beit magazine, which was a great window to understand what the interior decorating industry was like. I got to know a lot about art and design and the visual aspect of things — my role as a stylist to make interior design sets look as good as possible for photography, which was how I got into the visual side of things.

Part of my work with the magazine included working with hotels and restaurants and we would call in hotel chefs to come style food, but it just never looked quite right — they didn’t quite get to the same aesthetic as what we were seeing in international magazines such as Conde Naste. I discovered that food styling just wasn’t a dedicated job that existed in Egypt or the region at the time, so I decided to pursue a food styling course at Parson’s University in New York City three years after I had joined El Beit.

Sherif: You can actually almost take Hoda’s origin story and mistake it for mine if you swap out “food stylist” for “photography” and tweak a few other small details. I come from a big family of artists — my grandfather is Abdel Salam El Sherif and my mother and father are both artists — so when I finished high school, it was either I go into Fine Arts in university or I don’t pursue higher education at all. I decided to study architecture, and towards the end of my studies, I spent a summer in Hollywood for a training program, and that started shifting my attention more towards film and photography. I was always interested in lights and lighting and how they affect visuals, even with architecture, but I really wanted to get into film. Everyone I spoke with told me that, to do film, you have to start with photography, so I started taking photography seriously.

As a photographer, my dream was to work for El Beit magazine — at the time, I thought this would be the ultimate career goal. It’s a prestigious publication, but reality has far surpassed what I had been dreaming about. It was at the magazine that I met Hoda, although the idea to start Flavor Republic wasn’t born right away. Like her, I went to the US for another course that was dedicated to photography, and I started taking my photography career seriously.

Hoda: When I came back to Egypt, one thing led to another and, after a grueling few years, I landed my first contract with Savola to work independently on 120 videos. It was very exciting and I remember crunching the numbers, but the late Hazem El Dalaty told me that, with a chance like this, I should forget about the numbers and just follow my heart and passion. That’s how we started Flavor Republic — we had one big project, but we also wanted to keep the team when we were done with it, so we started out with a handful of clients who were on retainer, including Qahwa, Mori Co, and TBS. That was in 2015, and then by 2017 we started getting a lot of regional attention because we were the only content studio that specialized in creating digital content.

Fast forward to today, and Flavor Republic is a holding company with three arms: FR Content, FR Studio, and FR Ventures.

Sherif: A major milestone for us was the launch of Cairo Food Week earlier this year. This started a couple of years ago, I got a call from the World’s 50 Best Restaurants to bring me on board as an ambassador. That was a bit shocking, but it was a turning point when I realized that we had been so immersed in our work and the grind of improving our business and what we’re doing, but it dawned on me that we had really built something big and impressive. All of a sudden, within months I was on the judging panel for the 2022 edition of their ceremony in Abu Dhabi. This experience gave me a new dream — I began discussing the idea with Hoda, and we attended the 2023 edition together, where we met with several restaurants and chefs.

Hoda: Sherif’s version of the Cairo Food Week story is very poetic. Behind the scenes, the 2023 edition of 50 Best was two weeks before Ramadan, which is our peak season for FR Content. Rasha Saleh, our managing director and third partner, is a lot more grounded and business-focused than Sherif and me, and she questioned our reasoning for going to an awards ceremony at such a critical time. We felt that the food industry in our region needed the chance to get the same kind of treatment and spotlight that international food does. Our colonial histories have embedded within us a deeply rooted belief that our traditional cuisines could be considered “fine dining” or otherwise worthy of competing on an international level. And that’s something we really want to change.

Cairo Food Week was us giving back. Flavor Republic was the primary investor, and we didn’t raise any funds. We did have a lot of endorsements, but we’re the ones who covered all the costs of flights and everything else. We really believed in the importance of doing this event to bring regional players to the literal and metaphorical table. We saw an immense amount of energy and interest from so many people who wanted to help us push this forward — Alchemy Studios, Al Ismaelia Real Estate, the Grand Egyptian Museum — they were all so keen to help and give us what we needed to make the event a success.

We’re both creatives and visionaries, but we don’t do numbers, so the business side of things really needed someone dedicated and specialized — and we’re blessed to have Rasha on the team. Artists can be very passionate, which makes the business and finance side of things a little bit difficult, but you also have to be pragmatic. There’s a balance to strike between passion projects and building a sustainable business, which isn’t always easy, because passion is what gives you an edge, but you always have to think about the sustainability so that you can keep pursuing your passions.

Flavor Republic was entirely bootstrapped, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility of bringing in external investors to fund our future growth plans.

We look at a handful of KPIs on a regular basis: Quality, consistency, and growth. We assess growth in terms of growing the business, our people, and the ecosystem. These KPIs balance each other out, because we always want to grow, but we’re also committed to maintaining quality and consistency.

Sherif: The three of us — Hoda, Rasha, and myself — have a common goal and we do our best work when we come together and address challenges or problems together as a team.

From a business perspective, I don’t think I could possibly consider exiting Flavor Republic. It would really take the most extenuating circumstances to get me to leave it behind, and I don’t think I could see myself doing anything different. If we were to discuss it as a team, there are other feasible options on the table of course, but I don’t think any of us would want to fully exit.