Why would Mada Masr organize a marketplace event?

In three weeks, Mada Masr will transform downtown Cairo's GrEEK Campus into a stage set for artists, designers, entrepreneurs and creators with young brands to bid their ideas.

From the outset, when conceptualizing a business plan to render Mada Masr a sustainable and eventually profitable organization, we designed a series of revenue-generating activities related to our core work. In choosing events as a potential revenue stream, we delve into new and different dimensions of media practice.

The idea for the Mada Marketplace was born months ago, when our Media Development and Publishing team identified a lifestyle event as an interesting avenue to highlight well-conceptualized brands that are unique to the market.

In Mada’s Marketplace, we look into ways of mediating ideas in more spaces and through other means than our website. The brands curated for this showcase have interesting stories to tell about their products and concepts, and as a space that thrives on storytelling, Mada Masr shares this commonality with the Marketplace participants.

The commercial return of this direction aside, we also savor the meaning of interfacing with our readers and potential readers in the offline world with a desire to build networked communities around our project. There, too, we find our potential for survival and growth.

Mada Marketplace brings together initiators from the fields of publishing, design handicrafts, food, wellness, arts and fashion, among others. Here, they will put their products and services on exhibit, alongside stories around their creation. Musicians’ acts throughout the day and a set design of the space are artistic tinges to the event, and subtle reminders that art is a good companion in everyday life.

Over the coming weeks, we will be publishing stories about the vendors and the thoughts they put into their fields and sectors. In these stories, we will discuss issues spanning the modernization of food brands to suit changing tastes, the evolution of publishing English content in Egypt, and the use of heritage as a design reference, among other topics.

In reflecting about the stories behind our vendors’ production lines, we engage in a certain reverse-engineering of our consumerist practices in an attempt to explore new areas of coverage. And we also explore and broaden the boundaries of our media horizon and our scope, in keeping with the meaning of the word “mada” in Arabic.