Saudi businesses draw on home culture for inspiration

New brands discover lively demand for clothes and stationery with attractive local designs

Saudi businesses have started looking inward to represent their surroundings and their cultures and found an eager market.

Own Design started in 2009 when three young men from Alkhobar came together to make money out of their hobby.

Its clothes are designed to represent local culture, with lines such as ODxKings featuring popular photographs of Saudi kings on auspicious occasions or popular quotes by them throughout history to merge national themes with modern apparel.

The clothing brand has also featured designs coinciding with the Kingdom’s G20 presidency, titled O20 and G20.

“We have bountiful ideas that we want to showcase to the world, not just Saudi Arabia — we want to reach out to other Arabs,” said Faisal Al-Hassan, a co-founder of Own Design.

“We want to see foreigners wearing products that have a story.”

Rawan Stationery was started in early 2018 by Rawan Khogeer, a graphic design graduate.

From a young age, Khogeer was always fascinated by gift-wrapping paper and the patterns on them. When Khogeer received the news that her mother had suffered an accident, unable to find a suitable get-well card, she designed one herself.

When her mother saw the card she was elated and told her daughter to start selling them. From there she went from strength to strength. “People welcome us because there was something different about our stationery. They found products and designs in their mother tongue, which weren’t available before,” she told Arab News.

Rawan Stationery offers mainly Arabic stationary items, agendas, cards for every occasion and its own designs of wrapping paper, and it has found there is a popular demand for its products.