How Kotn is weaving a new future for fashion, from Egyptian cotton to community schools

From a six-month stay with cotton farmers in Egypt’s Nile Delta, Rami Helali co-founded Kotn. Now the brand is proving that fashion can put dignity, education and sustainability at its core, without sacrificing growth.

When Rami Helali first travelled through Egypt’s Nile Delta, it wasn’t with a business plan tucked under his arm. What he carried instead was curiosity. The Canadian-Egyptian entrepreneur wandered between villages asking locals what they knew about cotton, the country’s most famous export. One afternoon, a farmer invited him in for dinner. That single meal turned into six months of living with the family, working the fields by day, and listening to their stories by night.

“It made me realise that if Kotn was going to exist, it could not be built in the old way of buying raw materials and leaving,” Helali says now. “It had to be about building a shared future. Fashion has to be as much about people and dignity as it is about product.”

That conviction became the foundation of Kotn, the clothing company he founded in 2015 with friends Benjamin Sehl and Mackenzie Yeates. What began with a single Egyptian cotton T-shirt—a shirt designed to be perfect in quality, price, and integrity—has grown into a global brand with shops in North America, London, and soon the Middle East. Today, Kotn is a certified B Corporation, voted Best for the World™, and boasts the fourth-­highest B Impact Score of apparel brands in North America.

“Growth alone is not the goal,” Helali insists. “It’s about using that platform to normalise ethical practices in mainstream fashion.”

Kotn now works with 5,127 cotton farms and reaches more than 156,000 lives across Egypt. Partnerships are structured around multi-year contracts that offer stability in a volatile market, subsidies when harvests fail, and guaranteed fair pay. But Helali is adamant that wages are “just the baseline.”

“We reinvest in education and infrastructure,” he explains. “The idea is long-term partnership, sharing risks when harvests fail, and building schools so the next generation has opportunities their parents did not. It’s not charity; it’s systemic change.”

One of Kotn’s proudest achievements is the ABCs Project, an education initiative that has funded 23 schools across rural Egypt. The process was anything but smooth: land had to be secured, teachers hired, and resources supplied. But once the doors opened, the impact was immediate. Attendance soared, particularly among girls. Families who once assumed they’d need to uproot to cities for their children to have opportunities began to feel hopeful about building futures closer to home.

“This year, one of our first students will be graduating and going on to medical school,” Helali says with pride. “For us, that doesn’t feel extraordinary, it feels like how things should be. Education should open doors.”

Most fashion brands talk about “supply chain oversight” in terms of audits and certifications. Kotn, however, built its chain backwards. Starting with the cotton seed, Helali and his team pieced together each step: spinning yarn, weaving fabric, dyeing, cutting, and sewing. Every stage is overseen directly.

“Transparency for us is not about audits on paper,” he says. “It’s about being in the villages, in the mills, with the people, year after year.”

That model has allowed Kotn to centre Egyptian craftsmanship as much as Egyptian cotton. “It’s not just a material, it is a cultural inheritance,” Helali says. “By working directly with farmers and small workshops, we are making sure this craft does not disappear into anonymity. Craftsmanship is not designing for a trend, but for longevity—clothes people wear every day and pass down. That’s where the pride is.”

Kotn also ensures that all materials are natural fibers, biodegradable at the end of their lifecycle, whether for apparel or home goods. Every design aims for durability and timelessness—staples that last rather than trends that fade.

As the brand expands, Helali is wary of the compromises growth can bring. Kotn’s approach has been deliberately slow, prioritising quality over rapid scale. “Profitability and responsibility are not in conflict,” he argues. “We design for longevity, not trends. Fewer, better staples that people will wear for years. For us, affordability and ethics are not trade-offs; they are two sides of the same design.”

Kotn’s ambitions now stretch beyond clothing. Later this year, the company will open Beit KOTN, a boutique hotel located above its London store, followed by an even larger hospitality project in Cairo. The aim is not to diversify for its own sake, but to deepen the cultural connections at the heart of the brand. “The next decade is about scaling responsibly,” Helali says. “Opening in New York and London proved that a values-driven business can succeed in some of the most competitive markets. But we’re not just chasing growth—it’s about showing that business can be done differently.”

Helali is candid about how his thinking crystallised. Living among farming families, he saw how deeply their lives were tied to volatile global markets. “There was one morning when a farmer explained that if cotton prices dropped, his kids might not be able to finish school,” he recalls. “That hit me hard. From that moment, I knew Kotn had to provide stability for families, not volatility.”

That commitment—to stability, transparency, and dignity—is what he hopes will resonate in an industry still riddled with exploitative labour, waste, and greenwashing. “Sustainability is not a department,” Helali says. “It’s the whole company. From the cotton seed to community schools, every choice is weighed against people and the planet.”

Kotn measures its impact not just through B Corp benchmarks but in literacy rates in villages, gender parity in classrooms, and whether families feel more secure. “Beyond numbers, it’s about whether people feel more dignified than before,” he says. “That’s the real metric.”

Helali believes the Middle East, where Kotn is now preparing to expand, has a unique opportunity to lead in sustainable fashion. “Consumers here are young, globally connected, and deeply aware of the value of heritage and transparency,” he says. “The region doesn’t need to copy models from abroad—it can lead with its own.”

Kotn’s role, Helali hopes, is to prove what’s possible. “We want the world to see the Middle East not just as a place of resources, but as a leader in values-driven fashion.”