“Giving ancient crafts new worlds to play in."
Zahdei
Heritage Craft & Accessories Brand
Work Accomplished:
Comprehensive World-building — Brand strategy, Creative direction, Product development, Narrative design, Visual storytelling, Photography, Filmmaking, Communication strategy.
The Story
Golnar carries a lineage of Persian artists and architects, and a conviction that the objects around us should feel intentional, not incidental. Zahdei began as her vision - a way of putting that belief into the world through khatam, the centuries-old Persian art of wood inlay.
She brought me in, not to rescue a craft in decline, but to build the world that vision needed: the brand, the story, the language it would speak in. What followed was closer to co-creation than consulting: two people building a constellation from nothing, working directly with the female artisans across the MENA region who make every piece by hand.
The Challenge: Letting an old craft play again.
Khatam has barely changed in generations: gold, brown, black, applied to trays and boxes for a local decorative market. The craft wasn't disappearing, It was stuck. Artisans twenty years into the work had never been invited to see their own colors differently, and the market had never asked them to. The challenge wasn't reviving khatam. It was giving it permission to become something new - an object of contemporary luxury and everyday play - without asking the artisans to abandon what they'd spent decades mastering.
The Process: Starting from what the objects should feel like
The color conversation.
It started small - laying different khatam palettes side by side to see what happened outside the traditional rules. The partner artisans, in on it from day one, took it further: weeks later, they handed back a new palette for the Zahdei bags, entirely on their own initiative. That became Zahdei's origin story and its method - give makers room, and the craft moves on its own.
Building the World:
Beyond the product, the work was everything a new brand needs to exist - positioning, voice, visual language, the story Zahdei tells about itself. Same approach as every world-building project: start from what the object should feel like in someone's hands, and let the brand follow from there.
Outcome:
Zahdei now exists as its own world, carrying a centuries-old technique into a language of play, intention, and modern luxury. The Play Studio keeps funding artisans to experiment freely, moving the craft the same way that first color conversation started it.
The Play Studio:
A portion of every sale funds artisan micro-loans through Zahdei's Play Studio - direct support for artisans to experiment on their own terms, outside the constraints of the traditional market. It turns the founding insight into a standing structure, not just a story we tell once.
