Suha Mousa
Founder, Musa & Palm. Saudi heritage, made contemporary.
The light
Suha founded Musa & Palm in 2019, a women-led Saudi brand built on dates and gifting, drawn from the years she spent in Madinah. It has cafes and stores at City Yard in Jeddah and in Riyadh's Diplomatic Quarter, and it has worked with Cartier and Gucci as well as cultural institutions including the Islamic Arts Biennale.
The interesting part is the translation. Dates are the most ordinary thing in a Saudi house and one of the easiest things in the world to present badly to somebody from outside it: either as something exotic, or as a souvenir. Avoiding both at once is a cultural problem before it is a design one, and getting it wrong is how a great many well-meant corporate gifts land.
She came to it from the social development sector, and served as Saudi Arabia's ambassador for Women's Entrepreneurship Day. The work sits where culture, storytelling and commerce meet, which is a harder place to run a business from than it sounds.