How one entrepreneur is bringing new life to traditional Tunisian handicraft

“I am not going to pretend that I had any idea of what I was doing,” Leila Ben Gacem tells me when we meet in the medina, the old quarter of Tunis. After 10 years as a biomedicine engineer, she suddenly quit in 2006. “I wanted to do something meaningful,” she explains.

Though unsure what that would be, she wanted to help small companies brand themselves better and to help them sustain their traditions. With many years of business model development experience from working with a big corporation, she thought, “why don’t I do the same but for small businesses?”

Developing sustainable handcraft from the UAE to Tunis

With passion, that’s how it started almost 10 years ago. “You can put me in any country in the world and I will develop whatever heritage they have into a businesses,” she says with a smile. “I think the world will become too boring with Zara and Starbucks on every street corner,” she adds. “Every country has its own richness and I am worried it will all be lost and we will all look the same.”

So Ben Gacem established “Blue Fish,” a consultancy company, which is creating sustainable social impact projects in the creative sector. Blue Fish analyzes the creative industry’s needs, and then develops a project based on the identified need and looks for the most suitable funder. Once found, she works on the project as implementation consultant.

Original article by Christine Petré

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How one entrepreneur is bringing new life to traditional Tunisian handicraft