Our Story

Idea Comes Up !!

It was the school years of San Diego. Like all the other surfers Tayfun liked to lead an easy and simple life, therefore carrying a classic towel around the beach started weighing him down. He realized that Turkish towels were unknown in America.

In 2004, after he finished school, he returned to Turkey and decided to send Turkish towels to his mates in California . As time went on he managed to make a living from little orders for towels he was getting from the USA.

Elcin & Rabbit

In 2005, this time, his sister Elcin went to San Diego in order to get an education.. Elcin, who studied designing in Turkey, decided that she could start developing and designing Turkish towels (pestemals)

 
Towards the end of 2009, sales to US, Australia and Europe began to speed up. Turkish towels became more popular around the whole world- they were now unknown to no-one!

It seemed very hard to pull Elcin away from sunny California to bring her back to the chaos of Istanbul and the heat of Denizli. But who would like to leave a dream life to go back to reality?! However, Tayfun came up with a clever plan and bought her a cute little rabbit (Mesut) to keep her company, and for her to look after. His plan worked, and just as sales began to speed up, he managed to put the hero of all of the designs back to work.

In the Autumn of 2012, after listening to the advice of his best friend in L.A, Tayfun firstly made important connections in US, then other countries soon followed… As the connections he made became more and more, he carried on advertising the pestemal throughout the whole world. Thanks to hundreds of customers, where we have got to now is very pleasing!

Design Geniuses :)
 

Yes they are the geniuses.. Elcin and her team ; Hande, Dilay and Ozlem come up with crazy ideas every single day. They create collections almost every month and lead the way.

You have your own brand and ideas to improve ?
This team will listen to you, help and keep your artwork in secret. We are open to make any aggreement in order to protect and respect your "great efforts".

Cause we know how difficult it is to protect your own ideas and creations with patents and lawyers.

Nowadays we share our collections with existing customers only cause google says that 30% of our website followers are other suppliers and manufacturers :) (Thanks God)

Manufacturing the spirits of pestemals lie in the villages!
 

The only way that would match the spirit of the job was to not be surprised by the actual way of production…the right thing to do was leave the pestemals in the masters’ hands, and that’s exactly how we did it. Till this very day we still get our pestemals made by the masters of the job, and packaged just for you…

Villagers aren’t up for working at downtown. They want to work where they grew up, and learnt to weave pestemals. As they are pretty hard to persuade, we decided not to force them. The easy way for us would have been to keep the machines in our own constitution, but we brought our machines to their houses. Even though collecting the products from ridgeways, to then wash, twist and paint them is very tiring as well as expensive, we like it this way.

Thanks to these different phases of production, art is kept alive and families are able to support their children’s education! We have never for a second thought about parting with them, and this has definitely brought us a standard of quality.

We don’t like to say this but a proportion of the sales of pestemals are sent to children that have trouble in getting an education. In fact, without knowing it you are actually helping that trade.

Quality control, packaging and sister Rukiye!

Our sister Rukiye is the head of the control team and lets absolutely nothing out of her eye! (That’s probably why this stage is one of the most important!) She’s so strict that I don’t think there’s one person that’s alive from our team that she hasn’t given a scolding to. After the weaving and other operations have been completed of the products, they are sent to be checked by our sister Rukiye, which they are then sent to be packaged. And if there is to be a complaint by any customer, it’s best not be seen around that day!
 

For every stage, there is a different number given to each worker. So anyone who doesn’t fancy getting a scolding does the clever thing and very carefully gets on with their work!
 

Our adventure, which starts in the mountains of the villages, after going through all of the stages, comes to an end in the warehouses.
After all of the hand tags, bags, washing labels and accessories which belong to the customers are completed, they are placed very nicely into their packages, which concludes with a count of the product to then be placed into parcels.

Warehousing

Many of our customers orders and products stay with present stocks in our warehouse, which is roughly 4000 m².
As well as everything else, also having to supply fullfillment services is not easy at all let me tell you!

As it becomes time for a pestemal to be sent, they are placed into the parcels with caution, or which is more usually the case, after being packaged, cargo authorities come into our storehouse, drink a cup of tea, just before setting off to take the pestemals on a long journey around different parts of the world.