Thaqafah Shoes

My first business was an online shoe store called Sole Shoe Boutique

I mentioned that my shoe obsession actually started when I was a child and old enough to understand the stylish clothing and shoes that I was being dressed up in. I never imagined in a million years that my love of shoes would land me in the shoe selling business starting in 2006.


To make a long story short, I have always been fashionably and artistically inclined and actually started tailoring women’s and children’s clothing from the year 2000 to 2005 until I started to hate it so I stopped. I wanted a more sustainable and scalable business that I could take abroad with me when I finally decided to leave the United States permanently.

So in 2006 while I was pregnant with my twin daughters I decided I would try my hand at selling shoes since I loved shoes so much and I was excellent at picking out unique and exotic footwear for myself. But what I learned is that there is a huge difference between being a fashionista and knowing how to buy shoes for personal use, and being knowledgeable about footwear in general.

I soon came to find out that I was actually ignorant about footwear and so are most consumers who may purchase varying pairs of fashionable shoes over year. Knowing shoe styles and types, along with sizing and leathers, and process is another thing.

My first footwear venture was called Sole Shoe Boutique which was online based as I’ve always been online since I was always travelling between countries and needed to be mobile and ready to pick and go at will. I sold both American and European brands like Cydwoq, Jeffery Campbell, Clarks, Kenneth Cole, Miista John Fluevog, and some other Quirky brands just to name a few.

After selling shoes for about five years in my online boutique my family and I decided we wanted to move to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and bring my shoe business to the region. So my husband (at the time) and I both decided to get jobs as English teachers in order to gain residency and ear a living while I scouted out the business scene in Saudi to see if there was a market for the type of shoes that I was selling.

I tested many of the shoe designs on my teacher colleagues at my school, often carrying around my shoe catalogue of past season collections that I carried in the shop. I would also invite some of the teachers to my classroom and show them a collection of shoes from brands that I intended on bringing to the middle east to sell to the local market.

My colleagues were mostly Saudi, Egyptian and some other Arab nationalities and very few Asians in the school staff. They all were equally impressed and every last one of them said that they had never saw shoes like the pairs that I presented in the slideshow on the classroom projector.

After I spent two years in Saudi Arabia teaching from 2011 – 2013, researching my competition and making connections with the proper entities to establish a business license in order to move forward with my plan to expand into the Saudi market, I ended my teaching contract and returned to the United States to execute the remainder of my plan to relocate to Saudi Arabia independently to do business.

Unfortunately we lost our money that we spent in the process of buying a business license and trying to relocate to Saudi Arabia independently because the sponsors were not familiar with processing American visas for the type of business visas that they were used to processing.

I decided that trying to enter Saudi to sell unique footwear that is not present in the country was an excellent idea but for the wrong country at the time. So we decided that moving to the UAE would be a better option since they were more open and had a large expat community and accommodation for foreigners coming to do business in the country.

While in the United States I continued selling my usual footwear online at Sole Shoe Boutique until I decided to create my very own footwear brand Thaqafah which was inspired by my travels in the middle east across Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabi, living in these different countries on and off over a 12 year period starting from 2001 up to 2013.



Lashonna Ruqayyah,……………….