Seeing a woman wearing clothes with oriental designs has become an event worth celebrating, amid the prevalence of Western taste on our clothes, due to the domination of foreign brands on our local market, so entrepreneurs in the Middle East, in all fields, face fierce competition from foreign brands, with their enormous ability to distribution. But today, women can be said to be coming, and with force.
Forbes Middle East magazine revealed a list of Middle Eastern women who played a major role in creating brands that attracted the attention of a wide segment of consumers, until their nascent ideas and projects developed into profitable and sustainable companies, and indeed the most successful emerging companies in the region. And they managed to maintain their success despite the challenges that the Coronavirus pandemic poses to startups, and Arab women topped the top ten.
Huda Kattan "Huda Beauty"
Iraqi Hoda Kattan started her work on social media in 2010 with a blog about cosmetics and the principles of applying make-up. Then she started working on her famous brand "Huda Beauty", which today has sales of $ 250 million.
Hoda topped the list, and her success was not easy, as she was born in America to Iraqi parents, and her childhood and career as a young woman was completely far from cosmetics, but she worked in the field of finance, and as she said she worked "as an employee committed to working hours from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon." Today's world celebrities compete with two million followers on Instagram alone.
The transformation began in 2013, when Hoda and her two sisters, Mona and Ali, decided to start their "Huda Beauty" project after trying to buy false eyelashes, and realizing that there was a gap between the expensive product and the low-priced products, which prompted the girls to accept little or pay a lot for the beautification, so the three sisters decided to do their own project. And the advertisement of their products, which numbered more than 140 beauty and skin care products, including what has become today the best in the global market according to the classification of "Forbes" magazine, which in 2019 classified Huda as one of the self-made American women.
Azza Fahmy Jewelery
The magazine put the image of the Egyptian artist Azza Fahmy on its cover as one of the ten most important women on the list. Fahmy is famous for her authentic jewelery designs, and her first appearance was in the 1970s when artist Souad Hosni wore her designs in the movie "Shafiqa and Metwally".
This success was followed by her group entitled "Houses of the Nile" inspired by Nubia and the ancient architecture of Egypt, then mixed with gold and silver to show their contrast in designs that appeared in the films "Al-Masir" and "Al-Muhajir" by Youssef Chahine. In the first decade of the 21st century, Fahmy created designs that highlighted some of her favorite poets such as: Gibran Khalil Gibran, Ibn Hazm, and Salah Jahin.
Fahmy began her struggle story small to follow her passion for design, repeating her sentence "I tied my hair back, put on my clothes, and spent my days in a workshop full of men learning the tricks of making jewelry." She did not own a workshop as large as her designs until 2003, when she had to expand her small workshop to accommodate workers.
Despite her passion for displaying the beauty of the Bedouins and the Arabian desert, the pharaonic inscriptions, and her collections describing it as an ideology inspired by her love for Arabic calligraphy, Fahmy and her daughters Amina and Fatima reached the universality of their designs when Julia Roberts, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington wore them at grand awards ceremonies.
Reem Acra for the finest clothes
Reem Acra is an international designer known for her stunning ready-to-wear and wedding dresses collections. It combines tradition with a modern aesthetic, and leads the way by constantly reshaping fashion lines.
The Lebanese designer started her first work in her teens, when she designed for her mother a tablecloth, and realized her passion and motivation to study in fashion institutes in New York and Paris, and then set out in her work as a budding designer of wedding dresses, and she produced her line that bore the name Reem Acra New York in 1997.
Akra expanded into ready-to-wear with success in 2001, similar to its wedding dresses counterpart, and the collection featured carefully crafted pieces with flawless embellishments and embroidery and multi-layered textile details. She is known for her ability to make women look confident and distinct, and her designs have been worn by celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Taylor Swift, and Jennifer Lopez. Beyoncé and Selena Gomez also wore her attractive designs for the most important parties, and on the red carpet such as the Oscars, Grammy and Golden Globes, as well as her designs for the wives of heads of state and kings.
Forbes' long list also includes women who established tech brands in the Middle East and raised millions of dollars, such as Egyptian Abeer El-Sisi, who increased sales on her platform, Elves, during the current pandemic. The list also included the Libyan jewelry designer Joud Bin Halim, who recently made her way and proved her ingenuity in only seven years, the Emirati singer Ahlam, the Lebanese fashion designer Ingie Shalhoub, and the Palestinian Mona Atiyah and Lina Abi Khalil in the field of e-marketing.