Heritage Heroes: reimagining Moroccan craft with Nasser Zriouil

Heritage Heroes celebrates the artisans preserving centuries-old crafts and traditions. In this series, we seek out the workshops and boutiques worth the detour, the experiences that capture the spirit of a destination and the keepsakes you’ll treasure long after the journey ends.

For Nasser Zriouil, the path into design began, unusually, in aircraft engineering. The Marrakech-based designer and founder of Tribaliste is rethinking Moroccan carpet weaving through bold geometry, rich colour and a distinctly contemporary eye. His work brings together the precision of his engineering background with the intuition of the hand, collaborating with women weavers to create pieces that feel rooted in Morocco while looking firmly to the future.

Tribaliste is built on a belief that craft survives not through nostalgia, but by evolving. Nasser works closely with artisans, using technology to connect his studio with weaving communities while keeping the knowledge and skill of the makers at the centre. His Marrakech showroom sits somewhere between a gallery and design studio, where carpets are experienced through touch as much as sight.

We spoke to Nasser to discuss growing up in Marrakech, working with women weavers, and the role technology can play in keeping traditional craft alive.

What took you from aircraft engineering into design?

I don’t see engineering and design as opposites now. Engineering taught me that what you see is often the result of forces you can’t see. An aircraft is form responding to invisible forces: pressure, tension, gravity, movement. Years later, I saw the same principle in design and art. An idea, an intention, a piece of imagination – all invisible – can become an object, a surface, a colour or a piece of wool occupying a room. Moving into design was not a rejection of engineering, but a continuation of the same curiosity. I wanted to stop analysing structures made by other people and start making my own. Design gave me a place for the analytical and intuitive sides of my mind to work together. For a long time, I thought I had to choose between them. Now I understand I need both.

Where did your connection to Moroccan craft begin?

Something can be around you throughout your childhood, and you only learn to see it later. I was born in Marrakech, so Moroccan craft was simply part of the visual environment: carpets, woodwork, ceramics, architecture, colour. You don’t analyse these things when they are part of everyday life. Only with distance did I see them differently. Things I had considered ordinary suddenly appeared incredibly sophisticated. Carpets fascinated me in particular because they aren’t simply decorative objects; they are almost a form of language. That was the beginning of Tribaliste: recognising that we were surrounded by a creative language that had been presented to the world simply as traditional craft. I wanted to see what would happen if we treated it as contemporary creation.

Who were your formative influences?

There wasn’t one mentor. Travel, spiritual work and meeting women weavers shaped me far more than any single person. Spending time with artisans, I was struck by how physical their intelligence is – they often know things without intellectualising them. A weaver knows tension because her hands know it; she understands proportion through thousands of repeated gestures; she knows when something is wrong long before she can explain why.

Coming from engineering and consulting, where everything has to be named, measured and justified, this changed how I understood intuition. We treat intuition and knowledge as opposites, when intuition can be years of subconscious knowledge that no longer needs to be articulated. That idea has shaped my creative process. When I draw or make art, I try not to control everything. There has to be enough structure for something to exist, but enough freedom for something unexpected to happen.

How would you describe Morocco’s craft scene to someone who has never visited?

Forget the romantic image of Moroccan craft. These are real places, with economic realities, families, agriculture, changing aspirations and younger generations with access to the same world as everyone else. Weaving exists within that reality.

The rhythm is slow because the object demands time and patience. A carpet is built knot by knot, line by line. You can’t cheat time in this craft, which feels almost radical today. We live in a world where everything is optimised to remove waiting, yet there are still objects where time isn’t an inconvenience; it’s the material. When you look at a handmade rug, you are also looking at weeks of someone’s attention.

You’ve said you don’t want this sector to die. What did you see happening to the trade that made you want to intervene?

For me, the danger isn’t simply that one day nobody will remember how to make a carpet. It’s that weaving stops making economic or cultural sense for the people doing it. You cannot preserve a craft through nostalgia. If the next generation sees weaving only as difficult, underpaid work while someone else captures the value, they will choose something else – and rightly so. The question isn’t how we convince people to keep doing what their grandparents did. It’s how we make that knowledge valuable in the world they live in now. A living tradition has to evolve. Respecting heritage doesn’t mean reproducing the same patterns forever. It means respecting the intelligence behind them enough to let them create something new. Otherwise, you preserve the shell and lose the life inside it.

You’re connecting weavers with people across the globe. How does the WhatsApp bot work?

The idea was to create a technological bridge between our creative studio and a craft ecosystem that is still largely non-digital. I travel a lot and work visually, so ideas can come from anywhere: a sketch, an image, a material, an architectural detail. We needed a way to translate those ideas into production quickly and naturally. WhatsApp was the obvious choice because the artisans we work with already use it. We share drawings, dimensions, colours, references, corrections and production updates – without asking artisans to learn unfamiliar digital systems. The innovation is digitising the space between the idea and the hand, while keeping the craft human.

How do you make sure the pricing is genuinely fair to weavers, not just faster?

Pricing should not start with costing, but with valuing. A piece should be priced for what it represents: the labour behind it, the time it takes to make, the conditions it’s made under, the history and knowledge embedded in the craft, and its creative value as an artist’s or designer’s work. When you price it this way, you create more value around the object. That value allows us to improve working conditions and pay the artisans behind the looms fairly. That is how the craft becomes sustainable: not by making it cheaper, but by making sure its true value is recognised.

You’ve since combined artisan designs with your own. How do those collaborations start, and how do you balance your creative input with theirs?

I never think of the artisan as a pair of hands executing my drawing. I may bring the design, concept, geometry, proportions, colour or composition, but the weaver understands the material in a way I don’t. Wool has its own behaviour. Tension changes things. A line on paper is not the same as a line built from thousands of knots. Sometimes the most beautiful detail in the final piece is the distance between what I imagined and what the material or the hand decided to do. I used to think creativity meant controlling the result. Now I think it means creating the conditions for something to emerge. You have an intention, you give it attention, you act towards it, but you leave enough space for reality to answer back. Collaboration isn’t about deciding whose creativity wins. The object exists because both are present.

Tell us about the showroom in Marrakech

Arrive without knowing the collections. Start by touching things. The showroom in Marrakech sits somewhere between a design studio, a gallery and a materials library. There are our carpet collections, bespoke pieces and experiments, alongside the wider work I’m developing through artworks and objects. I want people to understand the material before they understand the categories. Touch a shaggy or flatwoven carpet. See what happens when the pile changes, the geometry shifts or light hits wool differently. Online, you experience design through images. The showroom brings back the other senses. A carpet is one of the largest objects you physically interact with every day: you walk on it barefoot, children sit on it, furniture lives on it. It should be experienced, not simply looked at.

What should a first-time buyer expect?

There are two experiences. If the piece is in stock, it’s straightforward: we prepare and ship it quickly. Custom work is different. Someone may discover a design online and want another dimension, colour or a version adapted to a particular space. Then it becomes a conversation. For pieces up to three by two metres, production takes about nine to ten weeks. Larger pieces take 12 to 13 weeks. I don’t want to hide that timeframe. Part of buying something handmade is accepting that the object doesn’t exist yet. There’s something beautiful about ordering an object that exists, at that moment, only as a possibility. Somewhere in Morocco, wool is prepared, colours are chosen and a loom begins turning that possibility into something physical. A few months later, what began in your imagination is lying in your home.

How do you hope people feel when they unroll their new rug at home?

I don’t want them to think it looks luxurious. I’d rather they feel the room suddenly makes sense. A good object does something subtle. It can feel as though it has always belonged, while changing the space completely. I want people to feel the presence of the human hand without the object shouting that it’s handmade. That’s why small variations matter to me. Perfection is a strange concept. Industrial perfection often means removing every trace of the person who made something. With handmade objects, what we call imperfection is evidence of presence.

Is there an item, one already sold or one still on a loom somewhere, that means the most to you personally, and why?

What stays with me are the pieces where something changed in the way I was thinking while I made them. Circuit was one of them. It came from my obsession with invisible systems and connections: electrical circuits, networks, thoughts, energy, decisions. It connects directly to my engineering background, but also to how I think about making today. There is always an invisible stage before the physical one. Before a carpet exists, there is a drawing. Before the drawing, an image in someone’s mind. And before that, sometimes nothing more than a feeling or impulse. The finished object is the physical trace of something that began somewhere you cannot see.

How has demand for this kind of considered, artisan-made buying changed since you launched 10 years ago?

People are much more visually educated today. Ten years ago, the conversation around Moroccan carpets internationally was often centred on broad categories: Beni Ourain, Berber carpet, Moroccan rug. Now people ask more about the designer, the materials and the story behind the studio. That’s a positive shift, but it also means visual repetition has become easier. An image travels around the world instantly and can be copied almost as quickly. The next challenge is authorship. For Morocco, that matters. We’ve spent decades producing things for other people. I’d like us to become confident creating our own ideas, brands, design languages and intellectual property – not just making things in Morocco. That distinction is at the heart of everything I’m trying to build with Tribaliste.

Tell us about a project that best captures what Tribaliste stands for

A hospitality commission spanning more than 200 rooms. What interested me was the scale. We often think of craft and scale as opposites, but the project asked: can an artisanal language become architectural? We developed woven elements using the Mrirt technique across the rooms, from bedside pieces to textiles integrated into the interiors. Weaving wasn’t an accessory added at the end; it became part of the architecture.