THE STORY BEHIND GIZAY
Between the field and the cloth
My father's family comes from rural Egypt. For years, visits to my uncle meant time among his fields and crops, close to the people who worked them.
My mother's father was a tailor in the heart of old Cairo, making clothes by hand, a craft passed down through his father and grandfather.
One side of my family knew how things grow. The other knew how cloth becomes something people live in. Cotton is where the two meet. GIZAY started there.
What stayed with me is how much knowledge disappears inside a finished thing. A sheet says nothing of the field, the mill or the hands that checked it. I wanted that work to stay part of what you bring home.
NORWAY & EGYPT
Built between two places
In 2017 I moved to Norway, where I came to know homes built around fewer things, chosen for how they work and how long they last. Øyvind brings a perspective shaped by growing up with Norwegian ideas of home, function and simplicity.
I didn't start GIZAY alone. Aly's family has worked in Egyptian cotton for more than a century. Belal and Mohammed are in Egypt, close to our production, so part of GIZAY lives where the cloth is made.
GIZAY is Norwegian and Egyptian because the people who built it are. It rests on knowledge older than any of us, held by the growers, spinners, weavers and craftspeople behind every piece. Our work is to keep them in view.
Where cotton is at its best.
GIZAY is Norwegian and Egyptian because the people who built it are.