Tamashee, the footwear label launched by Emirati designer Mohammed Kazim and Saudi designer Muneera Al-Tamimi, is selling more than sandals. Through a newer business called Tamashee Experiences, the pair are offering guided cultural trips across Saudi Arabia and the wider Arabian Peninsula, turning travel, heritage and identity into a packaged product with a price tag.
Culture, Curated
Kazim said he had posted photographs while traveling and kept getting the same reaction. "People kept asking us, ‘Where are you? This looks incredible. Why don’t you take us with you?’" he said. That demand became a business. The trips now cover food, nature, archaeology, history, clothing, traditional markets and folklore, with the company presenting itself as a guide to places and people that already exist outside the brochure.
"Rather than us simply telling you about a culture, you meet the people who live it," Kazim said. "You eat with them, listen to their stories, walk through their landscapes and understand things firsthand." The line sounds intimate. It also describes a curated route through living communities, where culture becomes something to be consumed in organized doses. The trips have run to Taif, Asir, AlUla, Qassim, Al-Jawf and Kumzar. The most recent took travelers to Asir in southwestern Saudi Arabia, near Abha.
Kazim described Asir as a place of dramatic contrasts. "The highlight of Asir is experiencing its culture firsthand, from its dramatic landscapes and traditional villages to its food, architecture, folklore and, most importantly, its people," he said. "What fascinates us is the incredible diversity within such short distances: from the high mountains (Saraah) to the lower valleys (Tehama), the desert and the coast, each with its own clothing, accents, food and visual identity."
Borders on the Map, Culture Across Them
The brand’s own language keeps brushing against the neat lines of modern states. Kazim said the collections are built around themes chosen to work across the region. "A lot of our themes deliberately cross modern borders because culture itself often does," he said. The current collection draws on the Arabian dagger, which he described as "an object that appears in different forms across the Arabian Peninsula, across countries and across tribes."
That collection was developed with Emirati researcher Halima Abdullah Rashid Muhammad. It reworks geometric motifs from dagger ornamentation as embossing on leather and reimagines the stitches used on dagger belts as lines across the sandals. The company says it is rebuilding the traditional Arabian sandal as a contemporary product, using new leathers, laser techniques and reworked patterns.
Kazim framed the design work as preservation, but not in a museum sense. "For us, it’s about preserving the soul of the object rather than preserving every detail exactly as it was," he said. "The side ring connections and the toe separator, for example, are elements we stayed true to because they are part of what makes the sandal recognizable." He added, "We shared a passion for the identity and culture of our region, and we were both concerned that parts of that identity were slowly drifting away."
The Brand and the Region
The sandals themselves carry another marker. Each pair has the hijri year printed inside the right sandal. "The hijri date is almost like a private detail between Tamashee and the person wearing the sandal," Kazim said, adding that customers had started to keep pairs from consecutive hijri years.
The company’s pitch is regional, but its ambitions are wider. "Ultimately, we’re designing from the Arabian Peninsula, but we're designing for a global audience," Kazim said. That’s the whole operation in one sentence: local identity translated into a product, then exported outward. The trips, the sandals and the branding all point in the same direction. Culture is the raw material. The market is the destination.
Kazim also said his and Al-Tamimi’s different nationalities had not shaped their work. "What connects us is a shared passion for the cultures of the Arabian Peninsula as a whole," he said. In Tamashee’s world, the region is something to be explored, worn and sold. The states remain where they are. The borders remain where they are. The people, meanwhile, are invited to walk through the scenery and call it discovery.