We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Hussein Musa a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Hussein thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the decision of whether to donate a percentage of sales to an organization or cause – we’d love to hear the backstory of how you thought through this.

When we first started PaliRoots, we wanted to think outside the box and look into a more untraditional way of giving back to the children of Palestine.

After months of brainstorming, we decided to create our own software to calculate meals donations based on total order value. The way it works is if you purchase something from PaliRoots.com, we will donate a free meal on our behalf, after that, for every $25 spent, we donate another meal. For example, if you spend $100, you will donate 5 meals to children in Gaza. We love to think of ideas that are outside of what typical companies do as we believe that this is what helps us thrive and adds uniqueness to the brand. But that’s just one of the many other cool things we do here at PaliRoots!

This app is also programmed to double the meal value in case we have certain times of the year when we want to give more. EX. Giving Tuesday. Until today, the development of this app is always improving and we hope that we can start licensing this out to more companies.

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?

Sure, my name is Hussein, CEO & Co-founder of PaliRoots. Our mission is to bring awareness to the world about the Palestinian culture and traditions and giving back is the core of what we do.

This company was founded also by my sister and father (who is our investor) to humanize the Palestinian people. They are limited by movement in their own land and are voiceless.

While our brand, let alone our existence is political, we try to focus more on showcasing the beauty of the people and the culture. Palestinian people are extremely hospitable and love the guests they serve.

We are an accessories and apparel line inspired by Palestinian Roots, hence the name “PaliRoots”. Our co-founder Aminah was featured on Forbes middle east and named the top 40 women middle eastern brands in 2021. Our brand is powerful because we’re not just a brand, we’re a movement and media and content creation is our specialty. We bring people the best quality clothing with a platform where they feel seen, loved, and nurtured.

PaliRoots is not just for Palestinians. It’s for anyone who has a love for the Palestinian culture and wants to support these incredible people who deserve freedom and an equal opportunity to grow.

We’re proud of our accomplishments. Since our inception, we have raised and donated over $2.8 million to provide relief to children in Gaza across 22 projects and a sustainable meal program. The PaliRoots Meal Program today serves 774 students for the next 4 years, breakfast and lunch. These children are one of the poorest children in our modern world, with no access to clean water nor healthy and nutritious meals. We also take care of their medical bills and offer nutrition workshops to children and parents to educate them on how to eat healthier. We have also funded projects to provide backpacks, water tankers, olive tree farming, chemotherapy treatment for children, and many more. Learn more here: https://www.paliroots.com/pages/charity

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Building an audience on social media is no easy feat. It’s definitely not complicated to do, it just required extreme dedication, and most of all, like any great thing in life, requires an extreme amount of consistency.

You are responsible to bring to your community incredible content, so you need to be very engaged in the community. You need to look for groups to provide your direct news from the source because the faster you are providing the media and the faster you are to deliver it, you typically win in the world of engagement.

Now, not many companies are looking to run their social media like ours, some just post products, but here at PaliRoots, we believe that growing and nurturing your community, will build a brand so powerful that it will be extremely difficult for it go away or be forgotten. That’s the power of brand notoriety. That’s the state you want your business to live in.

So go ahead, create content like crazy, repurpose content, but the idea is, show your community that they are the driving force behind everything you do and they deserve that recognition for buying and supporting your movement.

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process./

Manufacturing products are super fun but very hard. While you get to see your product go from idea to creation, it’s a high you have to experience. Especially once it’s launched and people around the world are wearing your products proudly.

When we first started, we had no clue, no mentors. YouTube actually was our first mentor, haha! We started learning about Alibaba, the manufacturers taught us how to import and duties and everything that comes with creating a product.

The hardest thing about manufacturing they are so many elements that are taken into consideration. The shirt dimensions since we’re not the type of brand that just buys in bulk and brings, we work at the cotton level and even create our own shirt cuts. There could be an error on the sizing, maybe from us or a manufacturer and now here you have 1,000 or 5,000 pieces that are defective. That’s why take your time, making sure the sample is perfect or you’re responsible for the losses if the error if from your side. Typically, if the error is from their side, a great manufacturer will eat the cost and reproduce it for you.

Another thing is from a fulfillment perspective, we never used to ask them to bundle stuff up. Now that we do, our shipping team saved hundred of hours counting inventory.

There’s so many nitty-gritty things about manufacturing and if I go back in time, I would have invested more time in looking for someone to teach us things to potentially watch out for!

Contact Info:

• Website: paliroots.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/PaliRoots
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/PaliRoots
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/paliroots/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaliRootsTees
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/PaliRoots

Image Credits
PaliRoots