Our Story

 

Founded by the Egyptian designer Noura AlNaggar, LABOGA bags engage the local material and craft industries to create products that are, in their contemporary creative methodology, classically Egyptian. 

Noura AlNaggar is an Egyptian designer. After receiving her MFA in Graphic Design from California Institute of the Arts in 2012 and working for a couple of years in the field, she decided to pursue her passion for crafts. In 2016, she moved to Cairo to start making bags. A city with a very rich repertoire of traditional crafts, alongside a fast-changing contemporary design culture, Cairo offered a great lure with endless inspiration and possibilities for a designer.  

Noura’s experiences in the bag-making industry are as experimental as her aesthetic. Equipped with her own culturally hybrid artistic vision and formal bag-making training in Italy, she vigorously explores the craft workshops and busy art markets of Egypt to find how her form-making skills can join forces with traditional tactile object-making methods. She explores ways of carrying her love for graphic design a little further into the realm of leatherwork, consciously seeking ways of actualizing the two-dimensional by turning it into objects and allowing herself to explore the material and spatial aspects of design. Her creative process involves working with her hands alongside the computer, sometimes with craftsmen in a workshop besides her quiet studio. Following a personal conviction that designers should explore work at the intersection of design disciplines, bag design has become the platform to bring together traditional craft, printing technologies, and her own artistic vision to create products. 

Narratives and anecdotes are intricately woven into every piece she makes, ranging from personal - and often humorous - stories about her process, to cause-specific, socially engaging goals. Designed under LABOGA, the brand Noura has founded, the bags have become a visual diary of the interactions, experiences, and inspirations to be found in Egypt. At the core of the brand is a mission to find ways to engage the material and craft industries of Egypt, and to promote those who work in them. Officially Egyptian, aesthetically hybrid, and quintessentially female: the brand aims to help women recognize and celebrate their own power and the achievements within their own lives. With her art, Noura wishes to find ways to partake in the contemporary visual and material cultures of Egypt. She wishes to share her products with people who recognize the uniqueness in them, and who support the cause of women everywhere.