OUR STORY
With a commitment to sustainability and impassioned design, Fouta Harissa creates beautifully functional handwoven textiles for the beach, travel, and home. We dream and design from our studios in São Paulo, Brazil to bring you a modern take on traditional Tunisian foutas.
Fouta Harissa is Alia Mahmoud and Lamia Hatira. We’re two Tunisian women who believe everyone should eat harissa and benefit from the high-quality craftsmanship of our country's artists and artisans. We’re swimming against the current of shrinking artisan opportunities in Tunisia by investing in handmade textiles, championing great design, and doing what it takes to create, grow and sustain desirable artisan careers in handweaving.
We met in Tunis in 2011. We’ve since bonded over our belief in the impact of social business models on their communities, our habit of gifting beautiful Tunisian textiles, and the dream of what could happen if we work with the artisans who make them.
We both have backgrounds in social entrepreneurship and sustainability and, as our friendship grew, so did the realization that through foutas, we could source raw materials, shape fair labor practices, and fuse daring design with centuries of artisan weaving knowledge. The stars aligned, and in 2018 Fouta Harissa was born.
FOUTA HARISSA | A VIDEO DIARY
On one of our long stays in Tunisia, photographer and videographer Bechir Zayene joined us on our now very familiar 3 hour drive south from Tunis to Mahdia, the state where our textiles are made, and spent two days capturing everything we saw to tell the story of how your fouta makes its way to you. Our friend and music producer Marcelo Gerab completed the film with an original score built on the rhythm of the loom in action.
