The Impact-Minded Entrepreneur Honoring Global Cultures and Women's Empowerment through Cooking
By Stacey Lindsay
In late 2019, entrepreneur and activist, Shiza Shahid, unveiled a new facet of her career. She and her husband, Amir Tehrani, along with their close friend Zach Rosner, launched Our Place, a line of streamlined cookware essentials for the home. The collection is a site for an aesthete. The items—an elegantly shaped, multifunctional pan in demure shades, hand-painted side bowls in speckled glazes, a durable serving bowl made by Oaxacan artisans—evoke a sense of reverie and artisanship. If the sole purpose in founding Our Place was to create stunning homeware items, the collections are knockouts.
But there is so much more to the story.
As immigrants, Shiza and Amir grew concerned that they were losing part of their heritage to the casual American ways. The days of people gathering around at home and cooking dishes native to their lands and families seemed to be dwindling. "We felt that was just slipping away, something that was so vital to who we are," says Shiza, who feared this led to further disconnection "from our health, from our food systems, from our farmers, from our families and communities, and from our cultures and traditions."
Inspired by the late Anthony Bourdain's quest to honor how people connect over food and narrative, Shiza and Amir set out to bring this back. They created Our Place to be a talisman that makes cooking accessible and joyful, and also flexible so it can be representative of the world's cultures. "Everyone was telling us to cook with lots of clutter, lots of really specific shapes and sizes," says Shiza. "We thought, well, can't we combine most of these into one? Can’t we just make it really easy to use so that people are not overwhelmed by their cookware? The result is a minimal collection, including a hero pan (deemed the Always Pan, a bestseller) that works just as efficiently for a vegetable Tahiri as well it does for coddled pork.
The fact that the hero essentials collection is a considered endeavor—it's made of sustainable materials, it empowers connection, it elevates female artisans—is a non-negotiable for Shiza, whose career in advocacy and activism started when she was growing up in Islamabad, Pakistan. As an early teenager, she began volunteering for a local NGO, working in women's prisons. She then volunteered at a relief camp after a massive earthquake shook the northern region of Pakistan in 2005.
It seems as if every aspect of Shiza's youth fostered in her a conviction to make a social impact and to eradicate the barriers that too often keep people from thriving. After high school, she headed to California to study at Stanford. During her sophomore year, she watched a video about an insurgency happening in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, three hours north of where she grew up. A group affiliated with the Taliban was destroying schools and threatening to ban girls' education. One of the people in the video was Malala Yousafzai. Shahid picked up the phone and called Yousafzai and her father.
This gumption ultimately led to the Shiza and Malala co-founding of the non-profit the Malala Fund, which invests in girls' education, primarily in regions where it is most dismissed. After earning her degree in international relations from Stanford, Shiza went on to work for McKinsey & Company as an analyst. She later co-founded NOW.Ventures, a funding enterprise that works to enable young companies driven by a social mission.
These efforts have all been part of a personal revolution to create impact and better lives that Shiza's been heralding since she was quite young. Her mission continues today with the home kitchen as her platform and the Our Space cookware pieces as her loudspeakers. And there's a magnetic quality to those pieces. You can't help but acknowledge their beauty, and, in turn, acknowledge how lucky you are to be eating the food served on them, with the people you're with. The collection is like a tangible reminder to be present.
But the impact, or rather the intent, echoes further. Beyond the expression and fun and tangible connectedness of making and sharing home-cooked meals, there is a currency for the most important element of life, which Shiza says transcends boundaries.
"When you see those expressions of love across different cultures, you just start to feel those divides kind of melt away," she says. "In this moment, where there really is so much disconnection and so much fear, I think that is becoming even more important."
A Q&A with Shiza Shahid
Our Place is the culmination of meeting a need in the kitchen: quality, accessible cookware—for everyone. But this is only a facet of what the brand entails. What other elements did you consider in creating the line?
It was driven by innovation. And then after innovation, it was driven by the connection. It was driven by a desire for a brand that represented our values. We are woman- and immigrant-owned, our largest factory partner is female-owned, which is where we create packaging that's 100 percent free of plastics, it's fully recycled, recyclable, and biodegradable made from 80 percent recycled materials. We specifically designed it so that the box is a shipper box, eliminating the need for additional packaging. We use recycled materials in our products where possible, our glasses are made from recycled glass and natural sand. Our pan coating releases less CO2 than alternative coating.
So, there's a sustainability component, there's an investment in women component, and there's a giveback component. We always work with nonprofits that work in communities. Currently, we're working with Feeding America to help combat hunger during the coronavirus epidemic.
And there's a big storytelling ethos. If you go and look at most cookware sites, they're talking about certain cultures—Italian food, French food—but they're certainly not talking about Pakistani food. It feels like so many stories and heritages and flavors have always been overlooked. We're actually celebrating cultures across the country, their flavors, their traditions, and partnering with them to create what we call our celebratory assortment or exhibition ware.
There's also a collaborative component in how you create those celebratory collections. You work with local artisans and research the heritage and traditions behind the cultures. Will you take us through this process?
For our Nochebuena collection, which is Christmas through a Mexican American lens, we sourced entirely from Mexican artisans. We had five different artisan collectives that we sourced from in Oaxaca. For many of those artisans, this was their first export to the United States, so we were getting them through the paperwork, through the certifications so that they could export to us and also export to others. We listed all of the details of all of our artisans on our website, so that people could then go and source from them. If we're able to source from factory partners that can produce high-quality products while keeping our labor and sourcing conditions in mind, at scale, then we can also support artisans.
We also partner with the community from start to finish. For our Lunar New Year collection, it started out with a survey of Chinese Americans, to understand exactly how they celebrate and what products they use. Then we worked with a Chinese American illustrator to create custom artwork that paid its respects to tradition. We also brought in this American modern twist because cultures are always changing and adapting, and they need to be portrayed as they are in modern day, rather than how they're imagined to be by outsiders. And then we sourced all our products from Chinese makers. For each collection, we try to source from the community. That's not always going to be the case. Every country doesn't always have kitchenware factories or artisans that produce kitchenware. This is a result of globalization. But to the extent that we can, that's something that we always aspire to do.
We then did a photo shoot and a series of interviews with an entirely Chinese American cast and crew talking about tradition of Lunar New Year and diaspora, and exploring the nuanced, complicated themes of identity and food and home cooking, and then we put out those stories.
It was a true collaboration in that way. And I think that's really the difference for us. It's very much done in partnership.
How do you see these collections helping to bring worlds together?
I'll have a lot of the people from within a community pick up on the fact that this is different. Not always if you're an outsider; you'll just see the collection. But when you're within the community, that's when you know. You know the inside jokes, and are there those inside jokes that only you get, that are only intended for you, that are not intended for mainstream consumption. That is, I think what really gets people to trust and fall in love. We see that difference. Why not connect with one community at a time? Why not be highly specific rather than how it's normally been done, which has just catered to the lowest common denominator?
We're taking the opposite approach and saying, "Well, maybe you've never heard of Nochebuena, but now you'll start to look into it and learn it." And across those differences, you start to see similarities. You may be like, "I don't celebrate Nochebuena, but my goodness, my mom keeps nagging me about marriage that same way." You start to see how similar you are, even though those superficial details may look different.
What makes sharing a meal with someone so powerful?
To cook for someone. To make something with your hands. To share something that is a part of your story and has been a part of your story before you even existed. It shrinks the distance between us. It's so primal.
I had been speaking to a lot of people who were celebrating Passover or Ramadan or Easter, and they were doing it from their homes. Mom couldn't come over, so they were writing down their mom's recipes because their kids were saying, "I want that thing that grandma always brings." It has to be exact. And they [the parents] will say, "My kids are really picky." And it's not that they're picky, it's that that exact flavor links to everything. It's linked to memories of your grandmother and those moments of being together and family. It is fundamentally ingrained into who we are and how we process our memories and our connections.
There's this deep intimacy. And cuisine is so different, but it all comes back to the same things when you see people eating and celebrating and cooking and really expressing love, because you cook for people to express love. And when you see those expressions of love across different cultures, you just start to feel those divides kind of melt away. In this moment in America, where there really is so much disconnection and so much fear, I think that is becoming even more important.
While everyone is impacted in a unique way right now, we are all collectively impacted in how we can or cannot come together. Considering this, what learnings are you taking from this current time?
I think the fragility of what we've built has become really clear. The fact that everyone says we had a thriving economy, yet people didn't have enough cushion to survive for two months without a paycheck? That's not a thriving economy, where for most people there's just no cushion for anything to go wrong. It feels like we were running really fast and hoping that nothing fell through, and the second something did, we realized just how fragile it all was.
I'm learning, like we all are, not to take connections for granted. I think a lot of us would get invited to a lot of places and say yes, and then cancel. Or we'd intend to catch up with friends. We're flakier today than we've ever really been. We take those connections and those people and those relationships for granted.
I'm also learning the importance of slowing down. If we continue at this pace for everyone to survive, that's just not sustainable, because look at how much better our climate and other species are doing now that we have slowed down. And while a lot of people are suffering from anxiety, a lot of people are also finding more peace in not needing to be running as fast and being everywhere all the time. So, I do think in everything there are lessons. This is a really dreadful, scary time, so I don't want to say that there are silver linings or winners and losers. I think we're all losers in this because we're all connected, but there's always something to learn.
What business reflections have you had during this time?
I think the same thing: about planning and having a cushion. We do a ton of scenario planning. What if this happens? If things go wrong, would we be okay? Would we be able to take care of our people and get through it? A lot of businesses fail to do that, especially a lot of venture-backed businesses that grow really fast and just sort of expect that the stars will continue to align.
You see so many very well-funded companies shut down overnight. I'm not talking about restaurants and small businesses where every day they're just trying to survive. I'm talking about companies that have raised $100 million and have still found themselves unable to push through or have had to let go of people instantly. I think it's important that we, as a startup, make sure that we're being responsible and keeping a cushion and planning for rainy days.
Let's circle back to storytelling. Right now as we're navigating the unknown, how have you been continuing to honor togetherness from a distance?
We did these Instagram Lives with people celebrating Passover, Easter, and Ramadan and asked the question of "how are you celebrating this moment?" Across the board, there was just a feeling of loss, but there was also the search for a silver lining. Liz, who was celebrating Passover said, "I usually have Passover with twenty-six close relatives in my home, and now I'm doing it with sixty relatives from across the country." And that was her silver lining. We spoke to Anna who was celebrating Easter. She said, "I'm writing down mom's recipes and I'm learning not to take for granted that she might not always be around. And that if we hadn't taken this time where our families can't come over and bring the thing they used to bring, we may never have written down those recipes." I spoke to a podcast host, Noore, who was celebrating Ramadan and is learning to cook for the first time. She is really seeing it as a survival skill and something that will lead her to feel more empowered, to be able to make the things from her culture that she enjoys.
So yes, there is loss, but also: What are also the opportunities that this presents? I think cooking at home a lot more is one of the things that has come out of this that will make us better off. Writing down mom's recipes, connecting with people that we didn't, and not taking that for granted.
To learn more about Our Place, visit: fromourplace.com.
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