MEET THE FAMILY
Born through family and long time friends, parents and passionate artists, the Eissa & Jude family is a melting pot of skills and hats put together, working together to make beautiful toys that inspire mindful and curious play.
Carri Al Humaidhi
As the seed planter, and the actual mama of Eissa, Carri came to notice the lack of Arab representation in toys and had this wonderful idea of making wooden toys for all children! Carri holds many roles with the Eissa & Jude family, as Operations Manager, Carri is found helping in the workshop, inputting information onto the backend of our website, and sometimes even making the deliveries herself. She takes care of our inventory and packing orders with her husband Khalid, contributing to our Instagram, and makes sure that all of our systems run smoothly. Carri received both her Bachelors and Masters degree in Education, used to work as a teacher, lending Eissa & Jude her educational training to make sure all of our toys are designed for optimal open ended play. Carri can usually be found on the farm in Wafra, playing with Eissa!
Khalid Al Humaidhi
Our go-to-guy for all things Eissa & Jude. Using his construction background, he built our workshop, sourced sustainable wood, mastered the CNC machine to cut all of our toys, facilitated the delivery of the machine to Kuwait (which was no small feat!) as well as handling all the coding work for the illustrations. Who knew there would be coding when creating and cutting wooden toys! Khalid is also the father to our inspiration- Eissa! Seeing Eissa play with the toys he is making and having him join in to the oiling process together as a family on the farm brings Khalid immense joy making all these the long hours ok hard work worth it!
Charmaine Al-Mulaifi
Our Eissa & Jude illustrator and designer. All our toys are brought to life first through illustrations. Charmaine draws them on her iPad Pro, and sends them over to be further digitized into coding for them to be carved out of wood! Charmaine has a Masters in Decorative Arts and Design, and does beautiful illustration and calligraphy work. As a mom herself, she finds designing toys that her son loves to play with to be the most enjoyable job she has ever had! We are grateful for her talent and ability to bring our ideas to life!
Djinane AlSuwayeh
DJ is an Art Director and an award-winning and internationally published Photographer specializing in fashion, beauty, and portraits, (now toys!) We knew we needed someone like DJ in the Eissa & Jude family to translate our ideas into one cohesive brand. DJ wears many hats as our Creative Director- our beautiful Eissa & Jude world, brand identity and aesthetics guided by her! She built the website, leads our mini campaigns, takes our photos, and manages packaging and branding materials. She lends her expertise in many other areas like strategy, time management and organization. DJ very much represents the philosophy of being a “child at heart.” We feel incredibly blessed to have her creative eye and work ethic!
Aziz Al Ghanim
The man of all trades, as the Eissa & Jude Product Developer, we can find Aziz touching almost everything else that is part of the process to make these wooden toys! He transforms Charmaine's illustrations into code, adding any last beautifying touches to them for the CNC machines to read them and make the appropriate cuts into the wood planks. Aziz also sands and oils the toys in the workshop, he's our IT guy when the machines don’t work properly, and codes away our website issues, helps to create the sets with Djinane on shoot days all while playing with his nephew, Eissa!
Adil Zubair
Eissa & Jude's workshop manager, Adil oversees the incredibly detailed work of our everyday process - production of the CNC machine, making sure each piece is exactly as it should be, where it should be. He also manages the organization of the workshop, which is no easy task! We are blessed to have Adil and his beautiful family living on the farm and helping us run Eissa & Jude. We truly mean it when we say we are a family business!