CAVE is a modest fashion and lifestyle brand.
Menswear, womenswear, fragrance and accessories, brought together by a focus on quality, material, craftsmanship and presentation.
Before CAVE
CAVE didn’t begin in 2016. It began years earlier, on market stalls.
From around 2005 to 2010 our family sold perfumes, hijabs and thobes. Years of selling face to face teach you things you can’t learn any other way: what people actually buy, what they come in asking for, and what they expect to pay for it.
We knew what people bought. We were the ones selling it.
It also showed us what was missing. A lot of the same stock moved through different shops under different names, and there was very little to separate one from another.
In 2016 we opened CAVE, and started with the thobe — the product we knew best.
- 2005–2010Markets
Perfumes, hijabs and thobes.
- 2016CAVE opens
East London. We started with the thobe.
- 2020Online
Lockdown moved the business online.
- TodayFamily business
Still family-run, with a small team.
We wanted a shop we’d actually want to walk into.
- A shop that felt calm and clean.
- Fabric we’d be happy wearing ourselves.
- Finishing that holds up close.
- Products presented properly.
- Packaging that isn’t an afterthought.
Much of what was available looked the same, and very little was said about how a garment was made or what it was made from. That isn’t a criticism of anyone else. It just wasn’t the business we wanted to run.
We have always paid attention to good clothing and good shops, and we couldn’t see why Muslim customers should expect less of that than anyone else.
Why CAVE?
The name comes from Surah Al-Kahf — The Cave. The story of the People of the Cave had stayed with us for a long time, and when we were choosing a name, CAVE was the one that felt right.
We wanted it to work for Muslim men and Muslim women equally. Not a men’s shop with a women’s section added on. That is still how we think about it.
You should be able to see the difference.
What we pay attention to is fairly simple. The fabric. How a garment is put together. The stitching and the finishing. And how the whole thing is presented by the time it reaches you — packaging included, because that is part of the product rather than something wrapped around it.
What we want is for a customer to see and feel the difference before we have to explain it.
For a long time, a thobe was expected to cost about £20.
- The fabric can be better than that.
- So can the construction.
- So can the finishing.
- Where it’s made can matter.
- So can the way it reaches you.
Change those things and you have changed the garment. The price follows.
That doesn’t make a cheaper thobe a bad one. It means we are making something different, and our job is to make the difference clear enough to be worth it.
Made close to where the style comes from.
OMAN
Our Japanese Omani thobe is made in Oman.
Keeping a piece connected to the place its style comes from matters to us. Where we can do that, we do.
MOROCCO
The Moroccan cut is where a lot of our design starts.
The shape, the hood, the trim. We keep it close to the original rather than reinventing it.
We start with the fabric.
We don’t begin by asking what something could be made from. We begin with a few plainer questions.
- Why this material?
- How should it feel?
- How should it hang?
- How do you look after it?
Most of it is in the parts you notice later.
The things that make a garment worth keeping usually aren’t the things you see in a photograph.
Stitching and construction
Finishing
Hand-stitched kufis
Packaging and presentation
Fragrance and grooming
The people who kept coming back.
We opened in East London, and much of CAVE grew through repeat customers and word of mouth. That support from the community is a large part of why the business is still here.
In 2020 the shop closed like everyone else’s and the business moved online properly. It wasn’t a plan so much as the only option left, but it is how we ended up reaching people well outside London.
Today we are still a family business, working closely with a small team that has grown with CAVE.
We’d rather the attention stayed on the work than on us.
The products can do the talking.
The part we like most.
- A thobe bought for Eid.
- An outfit worn to a wedding.
- A hijab that finishes the look.
- A fragrance tied to an occasion.
One of the best parts for us is seeing CAVE worn properly. Weddings, Eid, family occasions — someone putting the whole look together and genuinely looking good in it. That is still one of the things we enjoy most.
Where we’d like to take it.
We want CAVE to be one of the leading modest-fashion and Islamic lifestyle brands — thobes, abayas, hijabs, kufis, fragrance and the accessories that go with them. In time, stores in major cities.
That is the ambition. The harder part is getting there without losing what made it work in the first place.
- Quality
- Modesty
- Identity
- Craftsmanship
This is CAVE.
