In March, our co-founder Kenza sat down with Mikey Hanna to record a conversation for Afikra, a cultural community built on the premise that our part of the world deserves serious, curious, unhurried conversation. Not the kind that explains us to outsiders, but the kind we have among ourselves when we’re not performing clarity for someone else’s benefit. It started as a gathering, became a podcast, became one of the most influential media portals, because it is a home for scattered people who needed to find each other.
That context matters, because the conversation that came out of it was not the usual kind.
## Why OSAY exists
It wasn’t about OSAY as a product. It was about why a brand like OSAY needs to exist at all, and that why starts somewhere personal. It starts with growing up in Tunisia in the 1990s and seeing beauty only through a French lens. With entering an industry designed to make you feel replaceable. With realizing, slowly, that the fashion world has a habit of making certain people very visible, and certain people, the ones whose hands actually build the things, completely invisible.
OSAY began as a refusal of that invisibility.
## An argument, not just a product
We make shoes. But what we are really making is an argument: that the people at the bench are the designers. That craft is not the execution of someone else’s vision, it is the vision. That a product carries more weight, literally and otherwise, when you know the face and the story behind it.
## Tunisia’s quiet richness
Tunisia has one of the richest artisanal traditions in the Mediterranean world. Leather work, textile, construction, techniques passed down across generations, carrying centuries of cultural crossroads in every stitch. Most of the fashion industry either doesn’t know this or doesn’t find it useful to say so.
We find it useful to say so.
This is the conversation we got to have on Afikra. In the right room, with the right person, for exactly the right audience. We’re grateful it exists, and we’re grateful you’re reading this, whether you’ve known OSAY for years or are only just meeting us now.
## Listen, or watch
Listen on the [Afikra podcast](https://explore.afikra.com/podcast/the-afikra-podcast/r/recpupcENTxYHkeb6) or watch the full conversation on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZyoolMjGQ).
*Our stories are yours. We mean it.*
With love,
Simone
