The death of our collaborator Mansour has had a profound impact on us, as humans, as co-founders, and as a company. We are still learning how to navigate a post-Mansour world, and the consequences are deeply felt.
Throughout our journey building OSAY, manufacturing products, shipping them, managing inventory, managing people; we were told repeatedly by well-meaning mentors, potential investors, even friends, to reconsider manufacturing in Tunisia. “It would be cheaper elsewhere. Faster. Easier to manage.”
We discussed it countless times. But every conversation ended in the same place: No. How could we ever consider it? What were we doing this for? What was the point of starting this company if we were going to detach ourselves from the very people who gave it soul?
So many founders around us had never even met their suppliers and the people that are making their products and it didn’t seem to bother them. But it bothered us deeply. Yes, we sell products. Beautiful ones. But more than anything, we create human connectionthrough the objects we make. When you hold something we created, you hold a piece of a very specific story, one shaped by artisans who may have stumbled into this craft by circumstance but stayed out of love, creativity, and pride.
Mansour was one of those artisans.
A thin 73-year-old man with a perpetual cigarette between his lips and the kind of warm smile that arrived before he did. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, the jokes came quick and dry. Mansour was illiterate, yet he had been making shoes for more than five decades, a craft he knew like the back of his calloused hands. No one understood leather like he did. No one could cut it the way he could. His speed, his precision, his intuition… all of it came from years spent transforming work into wisdom. What he carried wasn’t just skill, it was an encyclopedia made of love.
Last spring, he died suddenly.
He left behind his young daughters, his wife, and all of us, his extended family devastated. The atelier felt orphaned overnight. Returning to that space without him standing at the door, cigarette in hand, felt impossible.
We moved. The team needed room to grieve and to find a way forward as humans first, as a business second.
We tried to hire someone to replace him. Many applied, a few tried. But this work is hard. It is repetitive, meticulous, physically demanding especially at the beginning. No one stayed. So the team remained smaller, carrying more weight while battling increased orders, supplier changes, tariff pressures, rising shipping costs…
And this is why delays happen. This is why things sometimes take longer than you expect.
Because behind every OSAY piece is not just a product but a human story. A story of skill and devotion. A story of pride. A story of grief.
If you are holding something we made, or waiting for it, or frustrated by a delay, please know: you are interacting with something profoundly human. Something shaped by hands, by history, and by loss.
Mansour’s legacy is in every pair. His absence is too. And our commitment to him and to all our artisans is why we will never walk away.
