We recently connected with Nourhan Wahdan and have shared our conversation below.

Nourhan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

I think the trend is the trend. I remember a term coined by Shumon Basar in his book with Douglas Coupland & Hans Ulrich Obrist “The Age of Earthquakes”, called “Change Vertigo” which is, in his words, “that unsettling sense of drag where the future arrives at a faster pace than our psychological, emotional and political capabilities can cope with.” And the reflection of that on the cultural landscape is the emergence of an abundance of microtrends online, we’ve had normcore, corpcore, tomato girl summer, regencycore, hot girl dinner, lazy girl job, Barbiecore, and the list goes on. And I think the biggest challenge is being able to keep up. So in an attempt to staying relevant we find ourselves glued to our screens, doomscrolling, and it’s a lot of pressure for many creatives and designers right now.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Absolutely! So my name is Nourhan, but all my friends call me Nou. I was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, and I’ve only been in LA for about two years now. I started off my career as the only design voice in fancy-party-having PR agencies. Afterwards, I decided to give academia a shot as a graphic design instructor at the German University in Cairo & Berlin. And I was lucky enough for my experience and network to lead me to capitalize on my leadership potential and launch my own studio, pew. in 2017 with my partner Al. The reason pew. came to exist is because we felt that there was a desperate need for research and strategy-centric branding efforts in the MENA region, so we’ve set our eyes on finessing a process that can take brands globally with an ever-evolving strategy that can stand the test of time.

And in 3 years time we started getting the attention of global brands like Youtube and Google, we’ve also started getting approached by scale-ups in the region, most notably Swvl, a mass transit app in Egypt that later became the first unicorn in the region with a valuation of $1.5 billion to be listed on the NASDAQ New York Stock Exchange. After our design and strategy efforts with Swvl we started working with a BNPL app named Tabby, now valued at $660 million in its latest round of funding from Sequoia Capital India, STV, PayPal Ventures, Mubadala Investment Capital, Arbor Ventures, and Endeavor Catalystand. We’ve done the same with other business in the region like SOKNA, Idealz, DTEK.ai, Hotedesk, to name a few.

In office I’d like to believe I’m the biggest multitasker, leading team workshops, following-up on project managers and directing creative output all at the same time, across 3 different timezones. In my free time I’m usually either aimlessly doodling or vehemently arguing over politics. Right now I’m renovating my latest Sims 1 house.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

If I said COVID-19 days would it be too on the nose? Because, my mind immediately goes back to those days! We had just decided to expand our branding services to experiential marketing, and had already locked in a few Google events for the year, but alas, luck was not on our side when everyone was forced to quarantine. And of course we had to let go of our office so we could keep paying salaries.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I think being a service-based agency had its own advantages, because we only had to afford our Creative Cloud subscription, but it also meant we needed to find other ways to invest in our business; those included purchasing online resources on branding kits, and reading material. I think this was when our network came in handy too! A lot of our friends wanted to support and also wanted our support, so we started hiring our photographer and copywriter friends, and in return we’d offer them branding services. Personally, I believe It’s important to nurture the network you have, because 7 years later and we still work with all our amazing talented community!

Contact Info:

• Website: pewdesign.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pew.db/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nourhanwahdan/
• Other: https://www.behance.net/NourhanWahdan