Palma & Ellie Home Turn Egyptian Home Stories Into a Collection

Palma, the Egyptian fashion and accessories brand known for textiles, prints and illustration, has teamed up with pottery and homeware label Ellie Home on a collection spanning ceramic mugs, lamps, quilted bags, pouches, hair wraps and more.

The collaboration will be unveiled at Bayt Yakan on October 24th, alongside the first screening of ‘El-Beyout Asrar’, a short film built around the stories, conversations and sayings that shape Egyptian family life.

Founded by Mostafa Magdy in 2016, Palma has developed its visual identity through printed textiles and illustrated accessories, while Ellie Home, founded in 2013 by sisters Nahla Abdelnasser and Nourhan Abdelnasser, works across pottery, handmade objects and homeware.

“The collaboration felt very natural because both Palma and Ellie are deeply artistic brands with strong roots in Egypt’s local creative community,” Magdy tells CairoScene. “We both approach lifestyle through art and design, but we usually express that through completely different mediums. That’s what made the collaboration so interesting to us - bringing those two worlds together and seeing what happens when Palma’s textiles, prints and illustrations meet Ellie’s world of pottery and home objects.”

Rather than dividing the collection neatly between Palma products and Ellie products, the two brands exchanged elements of their own design languages. Palma’s patterns appear across Ellie’s pottery and home pieces, while details originating with Ellie have been translated into Palma’s fabrics and accessories.

“We didn’t want it to feel like we were simply taking a Palma print and putting it on pottery. We really wanted the two visual worlds to mix,” Magdy says. “So the collection became a real exchange between the two brands rather than one brand being applied to the other.”

For Nahla Abdelnasser, Co-Founder and CEO of Ellie Home, the process involved working out what a shared design could become once translated between clay and fabric.

“At Ellie, so much of our process is about exploring the material itself: experimenting with clay, shapes, colour and what we can create by hand,” she says. “With Palma, that exploration grew into finding a shared design language. How could a pattern work on a ceramic piece and also translate onto fabric? Each material brings its own possibilities and challenges, and that became part of the creative process.”

The resulting collection includes pottery, lamps, tote bags, cardholders, quilted duffles, pouches, jewellery boxes, cushions and hair accessories. Instead of treating fashion and homeware as separate categories, the collaboration uses the same patterns, colours and motifs across objects made for different parts of everyday life.

That domestic setting also shapes ‘El-Beyout Asrar’, roughly translated as ‘Homes Hold Secrets’. The short film follows a girl listening to her mother recount Egyptian proverbs, with those sayings opening into fragments of family stories and conversation.

“The film tells the story of a girl and her mother,” says Omar Shady, creative director at Palma. “We tell the story through the girl's perspective, as she listens to her mother telling her certain Egyptian proverbs. From there, we move into particular stories and conversations. Throughout the film, we introduce the products in a very subtle way.”

The film will premiere during the launch before being released on social media two days later. Rather than stopping the story to present the collection, the pieces appear around the characters as part of the home they inhabit.

The October 24th launch at Bayt Yakan is being arranged along similar lines. The collection will be placed throughout a domestic setting, with household objects and live music incorporated into the space rather than displayed as a conventional product presentation.

“The idea is that you enter the space and experience the collection, but you see it within the experience of a home,” Shady says.

For two brands that usually work with very different materials, the collaboration is less about meeting halfway than seeing how far the same visual idea can travel. A pattern can move from fabric to ceramic, a home object can inform an accessory, and both can still remain recognisably Palma or Ellie Home.