The Carpet Company Paul Frank collaboration has a release date: 12 September, according to Carpet’s Instagram. For a brand built on patience and a studied refusal to chase trends, it is a partnership that lands at exactly the right cultural moment, as Y2K nostalgia pulls Paul Frank’s grinning monkey back into the conversation.
Carpet Company was started by brothers Ayman and Osama Abdeldayem out of Baltimore, and almost nothing about its origin story follows a conventional path. When they wanted to print T-shirts, they bought a used screenprinting press off Craigslist and set it up in a friend’s grandmother’s basement. A lamp to expose screens. A bathtub to wash them out. ‘It was really bad,’ Osama recalls. ‘But it was fun for us to learn.’
From a Baltimore basement to the Carpet Company Paul Frank drop
Paul Frank, the brand behind the Julius the monkey character that was inescapable in the early 2000s, has its own garage-workshop origin, built around a sewing machine, a stack of vinyl, and the Southern California home of founder Paul Frank Sunich. Two DIY experiments, separated by decades and geography, are now officially meeting in a single collection.
The timing connects to something real. Paul Frank has found renewed interest as Y2K aesthetics cycle back through streetwear, and Carpet, with its graphic-heavy, deliberately unhurried output, fits that sensibility without having engineered it. The collaboration releases on 12 September, as confirmed on Carpet Company’s Instagram.
Before any of this, there was a VHS tape. Ayman and Osama, restless kids growing up in Maryland with parents who were Egyptian immigrants raising five boys, assumed an older brother’s tape was something illicit. It turned out to be Welcome to Hell, Toy Machine‘s landmark 1996 skate video. ‘The mayhem that we had inside of us immediately connected to it,’ Osama says. Skateboarding gave that energy somewhere to go, and years later, the same persistence skateboarding demands (hurling yourself down repeatedly for a single trick) became fundamental to how they run the brand.
Engineers by day, skate brand by night
For a long time, Carpet was a side project carried alongside full-time careers. The same year Ayman began working at NASA, they bought their first screenprinting press. Osama worked for Maryland’s largest utility company and quietly ran the brand in the remaining hours, hoping colleagues would not find out. Even after their first Nike Dunk collaboration arrived in 2021, both brothers were still balancing full-time jobs against the growing demands of the label.
‘I asked my parents if I could quit for three years,’ Osama says. The careers were stable, immigrant-parent-approved, hard-won. Letting them go was not a casual decision.
The brand’s approach to product is deliberately impractical by conventional business logic. Carpet rarely repeats graphics. Designs that could have sold indefinitely are retired. The company produces items that seem almost engineered to be difficult: lacquered leather purses, ‘Habibi’ nutcrackers, fiberglass stools inspired by skateboard hardware. ‘We understand numbers enough to know when we’re making bad financial decisions,’ Osama says. ‘But if we really like the product, that’s all that matters.’ Their parents, he adds, regularly suggest going on Shark Tank. ‘They would kick us out in a millisecond.’
Geography has shaped the pace of all of it. ‘If Carpet started in New York or LA, we’d either be really big or dead,’ Ayman says. ‘Because we’re in Baltimore, we’re blessed with being able to do what we want at our own pace.’ Their retail network runs through independent skate shops and boutiques, including Dover Street Market and Supreme. Mall retailers have been turned down, repeatedly. Every Carpet skateboard is still printed by hand.
Brendan Yates, frontman of Baltimore hardcore outfit Turnstile, has been collaborating with Carpet since 2017 and describes the brand as ‘constantly manifesting what feels like childhood dreams.’ He and bassist Franz Lyons met the brothers through skating. Atiba Jefferson, a veteran skate photographer and friend of the brand, compares Carpet’s guest board programme and creative sensibility to Girl, World Industries, and Hook-Ups. ‘They’ve run their company like the most unique board company that’s not a board company,’ he says.
The flagship store, which opened earlier this year in Baltimore’s Station North neighbourhood, has become a meeting point in the most old-fashioned sense. Ayman has heard of customers forming friendships at previous pop-ups that now span different states. Custom Egyptian tiles, giant windows, a mirrored pyramid at the centre of the floor. An upstairs art gallery is coming soon. ‘Sometimes I walk in on a Monday afternoon and think, “Dude, there are people shopping in here right now. This is crazy,”‘ Ayman says.
Earlier this year also brought a guest board with Ed Templeton, founder of Toy Machine, who agreed to redraw the ‘Devil Cat’ logo as a sphinx in a nod to the brothers’ Egyptian heritage. Templeton sent a rough sketch on a napkin within an hour of being asked. ‘To think Carpet might not exist if we never watched that video,’ Ayman says, ‘it’s kind of a crazy thought.’ The Paul Frank collaboration drops 12 September.
