Strolling into ANŪT founder Goya Gallagher’s residence in Zamalek seems like stepping right into a hubbub of color and dialog. The area is superbly curated, with hand-thrown bowls artfully organized on the eating desk, hand-embroidered cushions perched on the sofas, and vibrant hand-blown glasses lining the kitchen counter.
I’m ushered in quietly, a finger raised to my lips. Goya and her Artistic Director, Cruz María Wyndham, are nonetheless on the cellphone, animatedly discussing a brand new collaboration. Numerous prints and sketches are strewn round the lounge, analysis for his or her new assortment, quickly to be introduced.
The 2 girls behind the ANŪT ship are fuelled by a boundless kinetic vitality that’s tough to place into phrases. Precisely one yr after launching their homeware model — devoted to bringing “the heat, gentle, and magic of Egyptian heritage and craftsmanship into folks’s properties” — their momentum continues to collect tempo.
As we speak about ANŪT’s first yr, they bounce feedback off one another, end one another’s sentences, whilst new concepts spark between them.
But for all this dynamism, Goya insists that, over the past yr, they’ve matured and develop into calmer. The vitality, drive, and motivation behind ANŪT stay the identical, however they’ve the foundations in place now to maneuver extra slowly, suppose extra critically, and be extra thought-about in regards to the path wherein they wish to take the corporate.
“Launching the corporate a yr in the past was a loopy second,” Cruz explains. “We had been on adrenaline overdrive, organising our launch occasion while making an attempt to deliver out a brand new web site, open a brand new manufacturing facility and an embroidery faculty, all whereas sharpening off a brand new assortment. It was hectic.”
The Launch
Certainly, on February 11, 2025, ANŪT introduced itself boldly. The launch occasion was held on the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Sq., an evening of gallivanting in “theatrical Historical Egyptian gown” amongst historic artefacts, with bespoke meals constructions designed by Egyptian-American artist Laila Gohar and customized headdresses crafted by Cairo-based artist Georgina Sleap.
The placement of the launch was no accident. “The place that almost all connects me to Cairo,” Goya tells me. “Is the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Downtown.”
ANŪT was born from Goya’s love of Egypt, a love rooted in Nineteen Nineties Downtown Cairo, the place she plunged into the town’s inventive world and co-founded Pose journal with one Sudanese and three Egyptian companions.
It was a vibrant melting pot of younger, keen creatives, a world she was decided to affix. That very same intrinsically Cairene vitality nonetheless fuels ANŪT right this moment, an vitality the corporate now seeks to broadcast past Egypt.
Goya describes herself as a mosaic of nationalities — a bit Ecuadorian, a bit Chilean, Irish, English. “Being an outsider is a part of my DNA!” She exclaims cheerfully. “However after I first got here to Egypt, from that first second I arrived, I felt like I used to be dwelling. And that has simply stayed with me, it hasn’t gone away.”
Particular and transferring for her personally, the museum additionally speaks to her on a broader human stage. “Surrounded by handmade objects, some over 4000 years previous but so much like the crafts we nonetheless make right this moment,” she explains, “You are feeling that thread of humanity that holds all of us collectively throughout time.”
This perception — that the handmade tells a narrative, sparks dialog, and brings folks collectively throughout time and area — is on the coronary heart of not solely ANŪT’s imaginative and prescient but in addition its success.
At present, sustainable craft is within the midst of a world second. In an excessively commodified world of distant and indifferent manufacturing traces, many have developed a newfound appreciation for sluggish processes, for the handmade.
“All all over the world, persons are beginning to actually admire craftsmanship and issues made by hand,” Goya acknowledges. “And Egypt is on the coronary heart of it. It’s the place it began.”
The Individuals
ANŪT has ridden this world wave by putting the artisans it really works with on the entrance and centre of the model. They don’t seem to be faceless, anonymous makers however proficient people worthy of public recognition.
Goya and Cruz personally know each single freelance artisan who works for them. “For us, it’s about chemistry,” they inform me. “About constructing long-lasting relationships.”
It’s intentional, too. “We at all times make it possible for we collaborate with like-minded folks, with people who find themselves open, who wish to dig slightly deeper, who’re keen to finish up in a special place than the place we began or anticipated.”
That the corporate is folks–pushed is obvious in how rapidly the 2 girls drop names, tasks, and concepts into dialog. It’s virtually unimaginable to comply with. A collaboration with Egyptian photographer and poet Mohammed Khattab has been quietly growing for over a yr. One other venture with Cairo-based Greek-American visible artist Leah Manatis is ready to launch in Athens. A 3rd with Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher Dima Srouji began from a dialog about Milan Design Week in Cairo and rapidly grew to become a gathering in Cairo.
They’ve a unprecedented capability to deliver collectively totally different media, artists, artisans, collaborators – to funnel all their disparate energies right into a cohesive path.
The Philosophy
It’s this eagerness to experiment that retains ANŪT thrilling and its outcomes sudden. “On one stage,” Cruz explains. “Now we have this fast-paced, product-selling firm the place issues have to be in manufacturing, in inventory, up-to-date on the web site.”
The enterprise must generate income, to remain afloat, to pay its artisans correctly, to maintain issues transferring.
“However in parallel,” she goes on. “We by no means wish to lose sight of experimentation, of long-term tasks which can feed into the merchandise on sale ultimately… By some means!”
They each snigger as she says this, however it’s an integral a part of how ANŪT works. It’s a persistent optimism: that, surrounded by the precise folks, with the precise mindset, issues will work out – in some way.
An enormous a part of the model’s technique is that it’s not overly outlined. After I ask them how the corporate got here to be, I’m advised it occurred virtually accidentally.
“It began about 5 years in the past, with out us even figuring out!” They go on between chuckles. “Nūt —the Historical Egyptian goddess who impressed the model’s identify—knew what was occurring after which we sort of tuned in.”
Even now, Goya and Cruz are glad for ANŪT to be open-ended. In reality, they encourage it. “We don’t actually consider in making errors, in constraints or set out guidelines, in issues having to be performed in a sure method.”
The Future
Wanting ahead, they’re channelling this identical philosophy. Alongside the thrilling information that their web site is lastly reside and taking orders in Egypt — a step that was extra bureaucratically difficult than initially anticipated — they offer me a sneaky preview of a few of their upcoming plans.
Whether or not nonetheless embryonic or nearing completion, every venture shares a standard thread: all are centred round folks, collaborators, and creatives who add myriad new dimensions to the corporate.
The main target is on progress, experimentation, and novelty via the prism of interplay.
“Artists and artisans have totally different brains, they suppose in another way, strategy supplies in another way,” Cruz tells me, in reference to an upcoming venture. “We wish to see what comes out of interactions between them, what outcomes can emerge from the slow-paced, in-depth, switch of abilities and concepts.”
The stress is on mutual profit and significant impression for each the artist and the artisan, their understanding of a fabric and its potentialities.
As we end our tea and our dialog involves an finish, I’m sworn to secrecy in regards to the finer particulars of their upcoming tasks.
I can solely say the 2 girls’s optimism is contagious, and there’s a lot to look ahead to on this planet of Egyptian craftsmanship. If the sketches strewn round us are something to go by, the brand new assortment seems to be to be an revolutionary tackle historic themes, a reminder that the impulse to make — by hand, in group — has at all times sure folks collectively and nonetheless does.
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