The devil may wears Prada, but Native is meant for the ones Beyond the need for Labels. Native is a brand that makes bags that are meant for talking. Strictly Talking! Period. My bag, c’est moi! Native bags are made with the dyed-in-the-wool understanding of the fact that a chic woman always clenches her bag in her fist, hangs it from her shoulder or dangles it ladylike from her wrist. Native offers a lexicon of style in the Middle East: Arabic Allure; Bewitching Bedouinesque; Classic and Cult; Desert Dreams; Diva’s Desire; Fabulous and Fluid; Passionate and Powerful; Zeal and Zest! Native bags simply combine metallic glints with futuristic hints.

The worth of Native bags can be measured by the age-old criterion: beauty of form, perfection of workmanship and value of material. All of those lie on the bedrock of Native’s philosophy from which it derives its name. Each bag is a reassertion of the Middle-Eastern ‘Native’ ethos. Each one is like an episode from the 1001 Nights. Purely Phantasmagoric!

These are days when a woman simply straps a cool pack on her waist, hip or leg as if the bag is an extension of Her Self. Native embodies this modern idea. The bags are thus sculpted to hug the body as an augmentation of a woman’s clothing. Native luxury bags go even beyond basic utility and display the same meticulous attention to detail as haute couture dress. Native bags, at a definitive level, aspire to be a work of art.

Several fashion experts forecast the end of the eye-wateringly expensive statement handbag. Native, however, has bucked the trend. In fact, it has proved the pundits’ predictions wrong. Its homegrown Made-in-Dubai anchor has attracted women not just in Dubai but all over the UAE and internationally. Women today are still spending hundreds to join the exclusive Native club. The luxury fashion house’s brand that has its ‘ear to the ground’ and an ‘eye on the sky’.

 

4 WS (WHO, WHAT, WHERE AND WHY) OF NATIVE

Native Dubai is a family-owned business that was born as an expansion of a desire of the husband and wife team Rachna and Rahul Malkani to invent ways to personalise, localise and internalise leather goods in UAE. In fact, Native Dubai was a happenstance and its history is peppered with incidents and accidents till it found its own feet two years since its inception in 2007. But before that the duo had just toyed with the idea of catering to the demand for corporate gifts and promotional items. While they were at it, it soon dawned upon them that there was a huge lacuna when it came to quality leather items and that was when Rahul set up his leather division under the aegis Leather Crafts, a genuine leather goods manufacturing unit, the first of its kind in UAE.

“Since we were over the moon for having created a world class manufacturing genuine leather luxury goods facility for the first time here in the UAE, we wanted to celebrate its success with a home-grown luxury leather brand,” Rachna says. “That’s how the idea of Native Dubai was born. Our goal with it is to assert Dubai’s stake as a leader when it comes to designing its own luxury fashion stuff in the international market.”

From a small workshop in Sharjah, Leather Crafts grew into a large-scale production outfit. Within a year they had outgrown the space and moved to the large factory they now occupy, which gave them the option to rapidly scale up production capacity. The business sucked in his wife Rachna into the fray and she soon thought of creating her own breed of luxury handbags and other accessories for the upwardly mobile woman. But she did not want her offspring to be another me too in the market. To the question as to what would be very specific to the sand and soil of the land she treads she had the brilliant brainwave that was christened Native. Thus the story of Native Dubai, just like its bags from its Native stable, epitomises how one can shape one’s own destiny.