Carpet Company Meets the Nike SB Dunk, Two Brothers Rework a Classic

Dr. Hossin Abdeldayem had the answer right away, although he was maybe the least qualified one to provide it, sitting there with his wife and two sons over tea. He is a scientist, not a skateboarder, and aloof to the world of sports footwear.

“Once I started college,” he says, “I stopped doing any sports—except walking.”

Still, he knew what the sneakers needed. So in one shot, with two pencils, he made it, writing out “Nike” in his native tongue and bending the Arabic script to find a balance in the calligraphy, the nun and alif arching high, slanting across like a backward Swoosh. The other letters huddle underneath, giving structure and symmetry. Dr. Abdeldayem’s tea time logo, like the sneakers it’s now affixed to, is an interpretation of American sportswear informed by an Egyptian perspective. But nobody anticipated the design coming from him.

“My dad kind of just always wants to add input. Just being an Arab guy, whatever he says is right,” says Osama, the older of his two sons. “And we usually expect whatever he says to be something not good—same with my mom. But, you know, they’re parents, so you listen to them.”

Osama and his brother, Ayman, are the founders of Carpet Company, a small Baltimore-based skateboard brand known for its screenprinted decks and graphic apparel pieces. Its design language includes bits of Arabic, anonymous images, cartoon-y characters, and flips of classic skate iconography. The mixture renders its catalog bold but not self-serious. It has a mirthful honesty, where a misprint can be embraced and a smudge of ink is a warm human touch. The work is part time for both—Carpet’s profile has risen steadily since its launch in 2015, but the brothers have day jobs.

“They’re so involved within it, I’m afraid they will leave the jobs they have,” their father says. “Both of them have very good jobs.” Ayman, like their father, works at NASA, Osama at a utility company in Baltimore.

Despite the limited time they can devote to it, Carpet has become a darling in the world of skateboarding. Fader ran a gushing profile in 2018. Skate outlet Jenkem documented their process in 2019. Supreme started stocking their clothes. So did spots as far as Australia and Japan. Somewhere in there, a longtime Nike employee named Rob Sissi reached out. At their first meeting, reps from the Swoosh’s skateboarding division, Nike SB, surprised Ayman and Osama with how much they knew about Carpet’s operation. Those talks resulted a year and a half later in a collaborative shoe bearing scans of screens they print with, hidden messages, and their father’s handwriting.

The Carpet Company shoe uses the Nike SB Dunk High for its base, a skateboarding-specific style of the enduring Dunk basketball sneaker from 1985. It adds a brew of graphics in light blue across the upper that wears away to show yellow leather with a fez-wearing character underneath. The heels have peel-off sections, the left revealing a note on the project’s origin (“Brought to you by the habibis at Carpet Company”) and the right revealing the calligraphy of Dr. Abdeldayem. The skate brand’s name is embroidered in Arabic on the inside of the collar.