Skate Cairo: Meraki Skateboards

Zedan Mostafa

Creative Director and owner of Meraki Skateboards in Cairo, Egypt.

Zedan is nineteen and runs Meraki — a Cairo skate crew he built from nothing, starting in 2022. He's also the person who, for a stretch of my time in the city, helped me find my way around it. He knew which spots were worth going to, who was doing interesting work, and how to get there. Cairo is enormous and doesn't give up its edges easily. Zedan made that part easier.

He took me for koshari. To the most famous koshari place in the city — the kind of spot that has a line out the door and a system for moving people through it that feels almost military. He insisted on paying. He's young — 19ish — and koshari is his favorite food. Not sometimes his favorite. His birthday food. Every year, he says, he makes his parents take him there.

I asked if it was better than his mom's.

"Absolutely," he said. No hesitation.

At some point I asked him to name five American bands he was into. I already knew two — Blink-182 and We the Kings — but I wanted to hear the full list.

We the Kings. Simple Plan. Blink-182. Green Day. Sum 41.

It's a very specific era. Pop-punk, 2000s, the MySpace-to-YouTube pipeline. The same music that was soundtracking suburban American bedrooms was apparently finding its way to Cairo, too — through the internet, through skate videos, through whatever combination of satellite dishes and file sharing made that possible.

Then I asked if there were Egyptian equivalents.

He thought about it. Cairokee, he said — probably the most famous Egyptian band of the last decade, huge during the 2011 revolution era. And Vemto — a young pop-punk band. His friends.

The pipeline Hani Talat described — skate videos leading to cameras leading to a whole creative life — keeps showing up in different forms. For Zedan, it ran through pop-punk. The genre that basically invented the idea of the scrappy underdog building something in a garage.

On our way to meet Mo Kamel, he pointed up at the rooftops from our Uber as we drove along the highway. 

Cairo's skyline, if you look closely, has a layer most tourists never register: the wooden pigeon towers. Tall, improvised structures perched on top of buildings all across the city. Zedan explained how it works.

You and a friend each take your pigeons to a distant location. You release them. They fly home. But on the way, the flocks mix — and the question becomes which pigeons are loyal enough to resist and which ones get lured off course.

"It's like a game," he said. "You see which pigeons are loyal to their owner."

It's an expensive hobby. Certain breeds trade for serious money. And there are people — he described this without a trace of irony — who specifically train pigeons for seduction. Birds whose entire job is to intercept rival flocks and bring them home.

I didn't know what to do with that information. I still don't. But it's one of those Cairo details that lands differently the more you sit with it.

When Zedan decided to start Meraki, almost no one thought it was a good idea.

"There was negativity from almost every direction," he said. "No one really believed it could become something real."

One person did. His mom. "Ignore them," she told him. "One day they'll be surprised."

He's been building it piece by piece since 2022 — no outside funding, no investors, no partners. He's been offered all of those things and turned them down. Nearly all his money goes back into the brand. While his friends travel or go out, he saves.

Meraki skate team member, Sonic holding a new “Skate over Chaos” deck with literal kids driving a tuk tuk.

"I believe MERAKI will one day stand on the same level as brands like Supreme," he said. "And I don't just hope for it — I'm building toward it."

The year he decided to go all-in on Meraki, he also nearly failed his university exams. He hadn't attended a single class. He'd been working on the brand instead. His extended family had opinions about this — someone told him that when he finished school, he could come work at their company as an office boy.

Thirty days before his first exam, he downloaded the PDFs. He started studying at midnight, slept four hours, kept going. When results came back, his grades were high enough to qualify for medical school.

He chose commerce at Cairo University instead.

"This major will help me with my business," he said.

He described the moment he saw his grades at his family's house — his mom anxious, him nervous, his cousin holding the results. When the numbers came through, his first thought wasn't pride.

"I didn't feel anything," he said. "The only thing in my head was that it can't be mine for sure."

Meraki is still small. The scene around it is still small. But it now has a team — kids like Alex Nakai who found skating two years ago and needed somewhere to belong. That's the thing Zedan is building. Not just a brand, but a place for the next group of kids who find a board and don't know what to do with it yet.

Whether it reaches Supreme is a long way off.

But the office boy comment hasn't been forgotten either.