Fadi Antaki

When Fadi Antaki started preparing his home office while toying with the idea of venturing into e-commerce in 2019, little did he know that the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 was just around the corner. And while the pandemic had made the lives of multiple startups all the more difficult, e-commerce companies were getting ready for a ride of their lives, as lockdowns forced people globally to stay home and online sales went skyrocketing. 

But Fadi didn’t know what was coming. “Having grown up around my family’s fashion businesses, I had opted for a career in tech venture building and investment,” he explains. He had built as a partner and worked at Egyptian VC firm A15 for a very long time alongside Karim Abd El Kader, before they both joined forces with Marianne Simaika, who came from a banking background. Collectively, they were seasoned investors and operations gurus. They were experienced in tech. Some of them had seen the local fashion industry evolve first-hand. And they had worked with and exited quite a few companies. 

“E-commerce wasn’t anyone’s strong suit, but to all three of us, the opportunity was uncanny,” Fadi says. They saw the struggles that Fadi’s family business went through when it came to digitization, as well as the difficulty in launching and running e-commerce operations. All three founders also knew what it felt like to order a clothing item online and be disappointed at the quality, fit and the shopping experience once they received it.

And that’s when a lightbulb went off. Why not build an e-commerce platform that helps local brands get ahead of trends using data, while offering customers a chance to get what they actually shopped for seamlessly? “The idea was to bring together Egyptian and international brands with a proper user experience that accompanies the customer from the moment they open the website until they try on the clothing item at home,” Fadi recalls. The bottom-line was to infuse the local fashion industry with data insights, convenient and seamless UX to help brands grow and make customers happy. And thus, The Fashion Kingdom — aka TFK — was born. 

And then in 2020, COVID-19 hit. “We had already crystallized their idea pre-pandemic, but building a company in the midst of a lockdown came with its own challenges,” Fadi says. Stories about photoshoots with models in face masks in remote areas and building a functioning platform while everyone needed to stay in their own silo became the norm, to count only a few of the challenges. 

But that did not stop TFK from prospering. Today, the platform hosts more than 200 fashion and beauty brands, and grew from six employees to 49 in two years. “About 45% of TFK’s workforce are women — ranging from the offices to the warehouses,” Karim explains. 

Back in 2019, nobody knew that Fadi’s hunch about working from home and going into e-commerce would be a life-changing decision that would allow TFK to thrive, despite difficult market conditions. “The model in itself is defensive to countercycles,” Managing Partner of Acasia Ventures Aly El Shalakany says. In the past three years, COVID-19 had been a key driver of e-commerce worldwide, and TFK’s dependency on local brands and customers made it almost immune to Egypt’s import restrictions and foreign currency fluctuations.