The Path To SABILI - Crossing Cultures, Crafting Identity
The origin story of SABILI as told by founder Dr Salam Fahad
Salam means "peace" in Arabic. It was given to me as a name because I was born just as the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988. The journey to SABILI has been one of creative conflict, a tension between an expected path and a deeper calling. I am a British-Iraqi psychiatrist from Manchester, and this is the story of how a career spent understanding the human mind led me to build a creative house dedicated to exploring our identities.
Origins: A Dual Inheritance
My story will be familiar to many who navigate a dual consciousness. My father, an engineer, came to the UK from Iraq in 1986 for his PhD; a temporary plan made permanent by the outbreak of the First Gulf War. I grew up in a home that was a pocket of Basra in the north of England. The scent of incense hung in the air, mingling with the aromas of my Arabic cooking. The walls were adorned with Arabic calligraphy, and the sounds of the East were the soundtrack to our weekends. Against this backdrop, my parents instilled in us a relentless focus on academic success, a typical immigrant mentality of study as the primary route to stability.
The first seeds of my interest in design were sown out of necessity. Mama was a true creative spirit, amongst her many talents was her skill at sewing and embroidery. Growing up she would sew a lot of the clothes that we wore, from infancy to our early childhood. As we started to become aware of the brands and labels around us, she would start to work them into our clothes because we couldn’t afford them with appliqués and embroidery
I faced the racism and elitism common for ethnic minorities in Northern England in the 80s and 90s and was often judged for what I wore. It’s a feeling many who navigate different cultural worlds are forced to confront: a sense of being an outsider judged by superficial standards. But this experience didn't just shape my attitude towards discrimination; it became the foundation for our core value of Unified Diversity. It is a commitment to rejecting elitism and building a community where multifaceted identities are a source of strength, not a reason for exclusion.
"Looking back, it was that broken mentality that I want to address - I had something tailored for me and made with love, and was made to feel inferior for it, desiring something mass-produced and exploitative instead."
The Detour: Discipline and Duality
Shielded by my parents' efforts, I excelled academically and eventually went to Liverpool to study Medicine. University was a culture shock. Away from my parents' strict guidance, I struggled to adjust and failed exams, a first for me. Having to resit two years was a harsh but necessary lesson in self-discipline, forcing me to learn how to regulate myself. This period was foundational to our core value of 'Purposeful Growth'.
After graduating and earning my first salary as a doctor, I fell into a familiar trap. I started spending it on the designer labels I could never afford, believing I was buying more than just clothes. It was a conscious attempt to purchase the status and acceptance that felt out of reach when I was younger; a classic case of signalling to compensate for a past lack. But the validation never came. It was a bottomless pit, a hollow pursuit.
That firsthand experience of being sold a superficial dream is what now fuels the brand’s deep-seated cynicism towards empty branding. It is why we are committed to substance, not status. I eventually specialised in Psychiatry, a field that taught me how deeply our stories and identities are connected to our sense of self.
The Turning Point: A Question in Liberty
The moment the abstract dream became a concrete plan happened in London. I was in Liberty with a friend, instinctively deconstructing a high-end shirt, pointing out the shortcuts in the seams and the flaws in the fabric, a critical eye I inherited from my mother. He cut through my analysis with a simple question: "Why don't you just do it, man?" He meant starting the brand I had always talked about. The question was simple, but it cut through years of self-imposed limitations.
"On the train ride home, I decided to take the plunge. I opened the company right then and there."
That moment was the start of a new journey, one that follows a humbling arc. It began with "uninformed optimism", a naive excitement of a new idea. This quickly gave way to "informed pessimism" as I confronted the immense gap between vision and reality. The process was a constant cycle of trial, error, and adaptation. It wasn't a glamorous montage of acquiring skills; it was a slow, often frustrating and expensive process of learning from mistakes.
Emerging from that is "informed optimism", a quieter, more resilient confidence rooted in experience. This cycle defines our core value of 'Purposeful Growth': a commitment to embracing challenge, learning continuously, and allowing our work to evolve with us.
The Vision: A Creative House Built on Empathy
My goal is for SABILI to be respected as a creative house, not merely a logo on a shirt. Our design language is a direct extension of that pocket of the East in the UK that I grew up in. The vision is to take the essence of Eastern artistry, its geometry, its textures, its stories, then intentionally fuse it with a contemporary, urban life. This is how we build a distinctive aesthetic that can be translated across objects and experiences.
The empathy gained as a psychiatrist is central to this work. I view SABILI as a platform to tell authentic stories, bridge cultures, and respect the multifaceted identities within our society.
This venture is about resolving a conflict many of us feel: between our heritage and our environment, our professional lives and our creative passions. It is about creating a platform for creatives from underrepresented backgrounds and proving that a different path is possible. We hope to build a brand reflecting the challenges and beauty of a life lived between worlds.
THE REVEAL
This story is the framework for everything we build. The empathy gained from a career in care, the commitment to craft inherited from generations, and the commitment to a purpose are not abstract values; they are qualities embedded in the fabric and form of our first productions. A quiet resolution to the creative and cultural conflicts many of us navigate, preferring to tell a complex story through considered detail over a brash logo. They are the result of years of research and purposeful growth - our opening statement in a dialogue we are ready to begin