The SOM Story: Dana Al Khobaizi on building her Kuwait-born activewear and sleepwear

Fashion

I felt like there was no brand that was catering to the petite, curvier, fuller-busted body type, with different proportions that most international brands weren’t designing around,” says Dana Al Khobaizi, recalling the moment nearly two decades into her career in retail when she realised the activewear she had spent years importing and selling was never actually built for the women buying it. Al Khobaizi had opened her first clothing store in Kuwait in February 2007, the first store of its kind to be owned by a Kuwaiti woman, and went on to bring in labels from New York, Los Angeles, Australia and Paris, including nearly every major activewear name during the category’s boom years around 2015 and 2016. “I had direct access to the customer because I was selling these brands,” she says. “I knew what worked, what didn’t work. The number one feedback was always fit issues.” That feedback became the founding idea behind SOM Active, and Al Khobaizi is careful not to reduce it to a single lightbulb moment. “It’s a culmination of experience, it’s a culmination of the gap in the market, it’s a culmination of a passion,” she explains. “There’s no point in starting something if it’s not going to be unique.” She began developing the brand in 2019, wanting to build the first Arab female-founded activewear label, and when the pandemic slowed the wider industry down the following year, it gave her collection more room to breathe rather than less. “That was actually a blessing,” she recalls, “because I had more time to develop it and perfect it.”

SOM Active launched in February 2021, timed to the anniversary of her first Kuwait store, with design details, among them a signature belted silhouette, built specifically around the proportions she had spent years watching international brands overlook. “When I see fuller busted women, the sports bras designed for them are usually old school,” she says. “I wanted to make something that was sexy and feminine, that brings design and function together.”

Craft carries through everything the brand touches. “We don’t buy market fabrics,” Al Khobaizi shares. “I source fabrics directly from the fabric mill, and we custom-dye everything, every season.” Manufacturing is split deliberately by region, activewear produced in China for its manufacturing technology, cotton and sleepwear made in Turkey through small manufacturers and GOTS-certified facilities in Portugal. That sleepwear line, State of Bliss, marked the brand’s biggest expansion, and its name plays on what SOM already stands for. “SOM actually stands for state of mind,” she says. “State of bliss is like being well slept, you slept eight hours and you feel good.”

Al Khobaizi describes the shift toward sleepwear as a response to a wider change in how women think about wellness, away from calories and step counts and toward rest itself. The line runs on 100 per cent Turkish cotton in custom, deliberately muted Pantone shades, and existing customers have crossed over in large numbers, alongside an entirely new audience the sleepwear alone has brought in. Asked for a favourite piece across both collections, the founder laughs before answering. “It’s like asking a mother which child is her favourite. Lately I’ve been very into the Calypso dress. It’s feminine but comfortable and soft, and I just keep rotating the colours.” Running the business for over 20 years, she says, has taught her to weight her own judgement as heavily as any spreadsheet. “We as women have a superpower, and that’s our intuition,” she says. “Statistics and data are important too, but if it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.” She credits Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things with confirming that instinct, since the book, in her words, argues there is no manuscript for the challenges that come with leading a business, only the willingness to stay flexible.

Al Khobaizi adds that being in her forties has given her the confidence to trust that instinct out loud. With SOM Active now five years old and operating across Kuwait and – starting this year – Dubai, a new fall activewear collection is on its way, alongside a second sleepwear drop planned for early 2027. “There’s going to be a lot more of SOM that you’re going to see,” she says with a smile.