story

"My name is Ayman. I'm Osama. We're in Baltimore, Maryland and we're Carpet. Yeah. Baltimore has a really small skate community. Everybody's friends here."

"Plus the culture here is just way more adaptable for what we're doing. It's just so lively, and just a lot of movement and it's not that hectic. It's hectic, but not that hectic. It can be very hectic. It can be extremely hectic, but it can also be not so hectic. Yeah."

"Just really depends how you approach it, you know? We didn't start Carpet to start a skate brand. We actually were very much enveloped in the skate community."

"We didn't make it to make a business at all. What I do in my day job is, I'm an engineer for the utility company of Baltimore. And I am a network engineer at NASA."

"I just do computer stuff. So we didn't think we were going to make money, but we just made it. And our skate shop, Palace Five at the time, was like, 'Yo, this stuff is cool. Can we..."

"...get some stuff in the shop?' So that's kind of how we started. At this point it was just me & Ayman, crank until 11:00, 12:00, 1:00. Do this every single day, because we didn't know how to do anything yet."

"It was all wrong. We had wrong ink, wrong screens, wrong everything. The way we were raised, it's like, we like challenges. We tried to make a screen print on a board & it didn't work. We just kept practicing. Learn to try, you know?"

"Probably best to open it with a paint can opener. This is our friends and family box. This will only be given to friends and family."

"And, here is thy shoe-ist. I don't even know where to start. There's a lot of different aspects to this. Yeah. So I think the way we started it was..."

"... we wanted to make something that was very wearable, but also has screen printing and under layers of craziness to it. We didn't want a shoe that just rips so we had to make sure that the base was just really good leather."

"Basically, this is old screens that we scanned, so every shoe is a little bit different. And then we just sent it as a… the overlayer to go on top, that rips into this canvas."

"This shoe is different because of the secret message. Yeah. The secret message pull tab, which… but we wanted to make it something interactive. That was a fun part to add. We want it to be hidden and kind of just be like, 'Oh, that’s cool. Like, I didn't notice that was there.'"

"We threw this Arabic embroidery on the inside. A part of it was to make sure that we show a little bit of who we are and where we're from. It does a lot for the shoe..."

"...but it also, like Ayman said, brings in the culture and where we're from and representing Egypt and the Middle Easterns out there. It's really cool. I mean, we've been collecting shoes for so long, having this in my hand..."

"...and being like, 'Dang, we designed this.' Yeah. I think the Muslim people out there, for the Baltimore people out there. For all these different sub-genres that are really underrepresented, this is a good shoe..."

"...to represent people now. And I think having this out is a comforting feeling, you know? Yeah, it's really comforting actually."

Behind the Design: SB Dunk High x Carpet Co.