Threads That Loom Through Time
Kahhal Looms
El Kahhal Family by Ämr Ezzeldinn
El Kahhal family has a long history of producing and selling handcrafted carpets. Since 1936, they have proudly continued to operate out of the same factory and their oldest retail location in Khan El Khalili. Continuing the heritage of Wekalet El Kahhal, which was established in Egypt in 1871 at the same historic location. The fifth generation, known as Kahhal Looms, was created in response to shifting consumer demands and new market demands. Utilizing the family legacy, expertise, and market experience, Kahhal Looms ventures into creating new designs, current processes, and sourcing distinctive items to meet the expectations of the modern world and living. DIVAZ’s guest editor Mohamad Baitie sat down with Kahhal Looms’ founders, Mohamed and Hend El Kahhal to discuss their illustrious family legacy, and their new-age approach to classic techniques.
Talk to us about your backgrounds.
Mohamed El Kahhal: I studied Finance and Marketing at Northeastern University in Boston, the state of Massachusetts.
Hend El Kahhal: I studied Economics at the University of Cairo. After I graduated, I worked at a bank for two years. After that, because the passion for carpets was in our DNA, I started working in this field. We both believe that this field is very wide and there are a lot of details that we were fascinated by. From the designs to the colors to the manufacturing to the sales, and dealing with clients. All these details were very interesting to us.
Did you know from a young age that you were going to take over and run this business?
HK: When my grandfather was still alive, I remember that we used to go to Khan Al Khalili with him. I used to take my friends and Mohamed, and we used to play and eat there. But our family didn’t put any pressure on us to join the family business, to take over or anything like that. Our father did a very smart thing; he made us fall in love with carpets. Whenever there was something interesting, he would show it to us. Whenever there was a beautiful carpet, he used to tell us to look at it and appreciate it, or he used to bring it to our house and tell us to look at the details. We naturally became more drawn to this world. This was the natural evolution of our lives.
MK: We were very proud of the product and the family name. One of the things that I will always remember is that there was a mosque in school and my father used to donate prayer mats for my school’s mosque. There were mats with the names of Allah written on them. They thanked us and they were so appreciative, and that moment really impacted me.
How did you get involved the business?
MK: It didn’t happen overnight. It took time and it was very gradual. For me, when I started working, I used to come to the factory and Hend used to go to the shops; It happened without any agreement, I was new to the industry, the workers had a certain unique language that they used to talk to one another and it fascinated me to watch them work. I sat with them and started working on carpets. I wanted to understand what they were doing. We both wanted to develop, we wanted to add new designs, new colors. We wanted to see what the market was capable of. That’s when things started to grow. We opened a branch of our own and it was a real journey.
Can you walk us through a day in your creative process?
MK: There are many different stages of making carpets. There’s no day like the one before. I might be doing something one day, and then something completely different the next. There’s nothing organized in our work; every day is a new surprise. Every day we learn something new.
HK: The stage I like the most in making carpets is choosing the colors. This step is important because the design could be beautiful, but the colors don’t match—or don’t match the design—so, the carpet doesn’t look good. This comes from experience. There’s a lot of trial and error. We create a lot of samples and we try to do the pre-weaving stages. It takes a lot of time and effort. One of the hardest parts is choosing the colors and adjusting the shade of the color so it’s exactly perfect. We’re lucky to have a factory with very skilled talents. They have a lot of very good experience. They always find the exact colors that we want. In the end, we always get the result we want.
How much of Hend and Mohamed are in the new designs? How much of your soul is in the designs?
HK: 100 percent of our souls, because we don’t see how the market is doing. We don’t bother ourselves with competition or trends. We want to be unique and creative, because in the end, we don’t want to make carpets that we don’t like. There’s an issue that happens a lot, actually. A lot of people come to us and say they like a certain design that they have in mind and they want us to execute it. They think it’s really nice, but we end up saying we don’t like it, so we don’t end up doing it. We want to make pieces that we’re proud of.
Who is your Diva?
Our diva is the Egyptian heritage and culture, it’s forever our main source of inspiration.
