Campaign to inspire Saudi fashion designers launched

Saudi women fashion label, Femi9, has launched a new campaign to inspire Saudi fashion designers and give them an opportunity to join the world of business.

The Women Appreciation Month (WAM) campaign, will see three contestants selected from among 15 candidates, to win the WAM Fashion Award.
A judging panel of top fashion experts will select three entrants with the most creative and outstanding designs.

All the 15 qualified designers will have a chance to showcase and market their designs before fashion experts, media outlets and attendees at the event.

They will also be awarded a certificate and a plaque from WAM Fashion Award.

The winners will be shown the steps they need to take to start their own e-shop on a website dedicated for fashion.

They will be able to sell their products around the world throughout the year without having to pay any logistics expenses.

Their designs will be displayed at Tbatik Boutique for three months. The judging panel will include the head of fashion design at Dar Al Hekma University, Prof. Dina Qattan, fashion designer and founder of Razan Al-Azouni brand, Razan Al-Azouni, the senior designer at Femi9, Yosra Efawee, and the founder of Niche company, Marriam Mossalli.

WAM is an annual initiative led by Femi9 in its efforts to recognize women’s role in society and express its appreciation for their contributions.

The initiative focuses on celebrating womanhood through different platforms that are of significance to women and play an important role in their lives.

Originally published on Saudi Gazette

On Creating Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises

A design of a woman wearing a black head-to-toe abaya as she rides her bicycle down the street features on the embroidered border of Ayah Al Bitar’s new range of floor cushions. She likens it to a comic strip that tells “the story of the life of a Saudi woman”

Her stand displaying her home furnishings, shaped in the style of a bicycle seat, at Saudi Design Week in Riyadh in May, attracted crowds of potential buyers and supporters of her message. Transport is a central theme in her collection and a loaded topic in Saudi Arabia, where the mobility of women is often restricted. The kingdom only gave women the right to ride a bicycle in public three years ago.

But she is pushing boundaries in more ways than one. Bitar, 23, is among the growing number of Saudi women setting up small- and medium-sized enterprises. “I’m provoking thought through my work but also as the face of my brand,” she says.

From cupcake making to furniture shops, clothes boutiques and consultancies, Saudi businesswomen are becoming a growing public presence in Saudi society even as social norms often still dictate they should stay behind closed doors.

These women are often in the top echelons of society, highly educated and frequently wealthy. But their participation in Saudi society is often misunderstood in the West.

“This place is not just about the abaya and women not being able to drive,” says a female art gallery curator in Riyadh, dressed in an ebony cloak, tightly wrapped headscarf and silken gloves. “You have to look past the veils. We are doing a lot of interesting work.”

Opportunities in higher education at home and abroad, financial stability, familial encouragement, the easing of labour restrictions and social media are among factors that are bringing more women into the workforce and the business world.

Samar Nasraldin set up contemporary womenswear brand Atulier after returning home to the Red Sea Saudi port city of Jeddah from her studies in Paris. “Many people here think, ‘You’re wealthy — you don’t need to work,’” she says. “But I wanted to create something of my own, to leave a legacy.”

“The outside world doesn’t see it, but there has been major transformation in Saudi Arabia,” says Reem Asaad, a financial adviser who successfully led the campaign to substitute women for male shop assistants in lingerie and cosmetics stores. From opportunities in retail to advertising and IT, more sectors have opened up for women. Economic necessity for many low- and middle-income Saudi families has also been a catalyst.

“The impact has been big, even in the last two years alone. The mall I’m standing in now has a 60 per cent female workforce,” she says of the upscale Stars Avenue shopping complex in Jeddah. “Traditional value structures are being challenged,” she adds.

Spurring the rise of female entrepreneurs have been improved women’s education and programmes over the past decade under the late King Abdullah, who paid for thousands of young women to study abroad. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have driven the creation and promotion of enterprises women can operate from home. “The economic and social needs of millennial women are different to those of generations past,” Asaad says.

But much more work needs to be done in a country where women only recently won the right to vote and are not allowed to drive. While Saudi Arabia scored a near perfect equality score of 0.988 (out of 1) for educational attainment by both sexes, it fell to 0.27 for labour force participation, according to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index for 2015.

Maha Al Sudairi, who three years ago created Think Tank, a brand and product development business, says female-run businesses can create more jobs for women. She says her company employs a dozen Saudi women who did not have the opportunity she had to live and work abroad. “I also envision creating a crèche for women who want to work and have children,” she adds.

Gender segregation has created difficulties for female-run businesses, many of which would prefer to use female providers of legal, accounting and management advice, for example.

Seeing the opportunity, a group of investors, including women from prominent Saudi families, has set up Rasyah, a wealth management, business advisory and development group to target affluent Saudi women — a market it estimates at SR100bn ($27bn).

It is not just the younger generation that is branching out. Nicola Beer, a lifestyle coach in Dubai says several of her Saudi clients are setting up their own businesses later in life. “Often it is a result of divorce or [other] change in financial circumstances, or after their kids have grown up,” she says. “Many women have devoted their lives to their husbands and children. When they’re no longer there, they think, ‘Now it’s about me, what do I want to do?’”

After more than 30 years as a professor of biology in Riyadh, May Al Jaser set up a gelato shop in her 60s. “I thought I would retire and try something new. But this is anything but part-time — it’s a full time commitment,” she says. 

She refused to operate the business with a male legal representative, she adds. “I did everything myself; I didn’t want to be behind the scenes. Going to the municipality for permits, the chamber of commerce, getting my equipment through customs at the airport — I went into all of these male-dominated areas. Even a decade ago I couldn’t have done this.”

Originally Published on Financial Times 

This New Site Reveals How Your Clothes Were Really Made

Our shopping strategy usually revolves around hitting that clothing trifecta: pieces that look good, fit well, and are affordable (or, at least, that don’t involve utterly obliterating one’s bank account). But what if your retail approach could involve a quick check of a brand’s manufacturing practices and ethics? Project JUST is poised to provide just that.

The well-designed site, which launched two weeks ago, is a catalog and forum of research on fashion brands’ manufacturing M.O. — plus their environmental and social impacts. The objective: to bring transparency to an industry that’s been pretty fickle about disclosing much about the supply chain, and to highlight (and perhaps sway shopping in favor of) brands that are ethically sound behind the scenes. 

The site was founded by Natalie Grillon and Shahd AlShehail, who met in 2013 as global fellows at Acumen, a non-profit impact investing fund. Both women had pivotal experiences that helped spur Project JUST’s inception. Grillon had worked for a cotton company in Uganda that implemented an organic and fair-trade cotton-farming program to help farmers rebuild their lives after decades of civil war — the work was important, but customers buying the company's threads didn’t know the inspiring backstory. AlShehail also cofounded a Saudi Arabian fashion house that worked with regional women artisans; she thought there was room to improve how that supply chain’s story was told, too. 

The Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh a few months later led the duo to realize that transparency is crucial; fashion brands need to share the negative practices taking place, not just the heartwarming, doing-good stuff. “We didn’t set out to showcase the negative,” Grillon says. “But the more we learned about practices in the supply chain, the more we realized that, through our purchases, we were supporting practices with which we didn't agree, and we knew our friends wouldn’t, either.” Thus came the idea for Project JUST. After almost a year of development, this “Wikipedia for fashion supply chains,” as Grillon puts it, was born.

Project JUST applies a four-step filter to fashion brands: first up, self-reported information (i.e. from the brand’s site, 10-Ks, executive speeches, and sustainability reports). This covers size and business model, transparency, labor conditions, environment, innovation, intention, management, and community — “in many cases, unfortunately, it’s not a lot,” Grillon says. Then, Project JUST looks at what other NGOs or on-the-ground organizations have published about that brand’s supply chain (sometimes supplemented by further research or rankings comparing that specific brand to comparable ones on the market). Research on media coverage and investigative reporting comes next, followed by direct outreach to the brand, offering a chance to give honest input. 

Currently, the site features 47 brands, with a goal of 150 brands by early spring, including expansion into markets like Europe and the Middle East. You’ll find names like Reformation, Everlane, Warby Parker, Indego Africa, Duka, and Beru Kids, along with major chain retailers. Expect to see lots of smaller indie brands in the mix soon. Project JUST caters to what Grillon calls “female urbanite millennials” and Gen Z in the U.S., U.K., and Australia — and it's also aimed at those in the fashion industry. 

At the moment, for a smaller brand owned by a huge corporation (J Brand's parent company is Fast Retailing, which also owns Uniqlo, for example) you can only view information about the parent company's practices. But that should change as user-supplied information fills in the gaps for brands owned by large parent companies, Grillon says. 

The concept is quite similar to Australia’s Good On You app, which isn’t yet available stateside; Project JUST is uniquely focused on creating a space to spur ongoing conversation between shoppers, fashion brands, and industry activists about the topic, versus being primarily an information source for customers. Project JUST doesn’t have an app yet, but one is in the works, probably with shopping-centric maps and geotagging capacities. 

Grillon and AlShehail have been shocked by the disconnect factor, or “how little some of these brands actually do know about their supply chain,” Grillon says. “Many brands we've come across contract out their entire supply chain, only designing the item and sending it out to be produced, not knowing the factory where it will be manufactured.” 

On a brighter note, there are the covert do-gooders — labels “making incredible strides in improving their practices that have shied away from being transparent,” Grillon adds. But that lack of broadcasting means shoppers don't know about many positive practices already in place, and thus aren’t as trained to seek out ethically produced clothing. Grillon explains that "in some ways, this has prevented other brands from learning” from the quietly upstanding fashion labels out there.

Next up, Project JUST will roll out a biannual award in early 2016, called #JUSTapproved, for fashion brands that deserve some love for their ethically commendable efforts. “They have either set out to create a sustainable business model from day one, to improve or transform their operations in a radical way, are preserving or celebrating a craft or art which creates additional value in the clothing for everyone involved, or are working on an initiative we think could change the industry — small indie brands or big-name brands,” Grillon says. “We've heard from a lot of our followers that they are searching for a curated list of positive brands and practices that they can discover.” There will likely even be “#JUSTapproved” stickers given to brands, to indicate they're ethically sound. 

Beyond the current four-step process, Project JUST is now working on gathering and incorporating extensive crowd-sourced data — from shoppers, fashion-brand employees, journalists, NGOs, and industry execs — into the site, as well as editorial content using the site’s data crunching, and extensive annual overviews of each brand. This ensures that the data isn’t out of date (for better or for worse).

“Our mission is to transform the fashion industry into a transparent, accountable, and sustainable system that celebrates the stories, the people, and the resources behind the clothing,” Grillon says. “To impact and incite change, we believe that one missing — but important! — voice is the shopper’s. Empowered with information, s/he can make purchases aligned with their values, shifting demand towards positive practices and sending a signal to brands and the industry.”

Originally published on Refinery29

Saudi Gazette Appoints Kingdom’s First Female Newspaper Editor

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The Saudi Gazette newspaper has appointed the country’s first female editor-in-chief, in what has been called a “historic” move in the conservative kingdom.

Somayya Jabarti takes the reins of the English-language newspaper from Khaled Almaeena, who becomes editor-at-large.

Jabarti, previously deputy editor, becomes the first female editor of a national newspaper in Saudi Arabia, although other women have headed magazines in the kingdom.

“There’s a crack that has been made in the glass ceiling. And I’m hoping it will be made into a door,” Jabarti told Al Arabiya News.

“This is a first for a Saudi daily… A mold has been broken where editors-in-chief of Saudi daily newspapers are concerned.”

Jabarti spoke of the responsibility she feels in the new position, given that her success may have a bearing on other women’s careers.

“Being the first Saudi woman [newspaper editor] is going to be double the responsibility... One’s actions will reflect upon my fellow Saudi women,” she said.

“The success will not be complete unless I see my peers who are also Saudi women in the media, take other roles where they are decision makers.”

Before joining the Saudi Gazette in March 2011, Jabarti worked at rival newspaper Arab News, where over nine years she rose in the ranks to deputy editor.

Jabarti’s new role begins imminently, with her name appearing on the newspaper masthead from tomorrow.

The editor says she has not encountered any sexism or racism at Saudi Gazette, which has about 20 reporters, of which just three are men.

“The majority of our reporters are women – not because we are biased and choosing women over men. There are more women who are interested in being journalists, and who are journalists.”

However, most of the newspaper’s staff are content editors, and these are predominately men, she added. She said Saudi visa restrictions and working hours were challenges to employing more women.

The former editor-in-chief Almaeena confirmed the change at the newspaper, calling Jabarti’s appointment a “historic” move.

“She’s the first editor-in-chief of a Saudi paper - English or Arabic-language,” he said. “In Saudi Arabia it’s a major achievement.”

Almaeena, writing of his move here, said he has long held a goal of seeing a “Saudi woman enter the male-dominated bastion of editors-in-chief.”

But he told Al Arabiya News that Jabarti’s gender was not a factor in the appointment. “She deserves it,” he said. “For me, gender doesn’t matter.”

Almaeena said that the newspaper’s “greatest competitor” is Twitter, something that will prove a “major challenge” for the new editor.

Almaeena took the editorship of Saudi Gazette in April 2012, having twice been editor of Arab News, from 1982 to 1993 and from 1998 to 2011.

“An editor-in-chief is like a platoon commander,” he wrote. “He has to make hasty decisions, shoot from the hip and improvise without turning to press rules and regulations. And I enjoy doing that as exhibited by front-paging the story of the two Saudi women athletes to the Olympics when many others were hesitant to do so. For our team, red lines often were very thin and blurred.”

Published on Alarabiya English by Ben Flanegan