The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

If you’ve been to Hacienda Bay’s open-air shopping and food court, Lakeyard, you’ve probably been impressed by the cute graffiti, the quaint Santorini rip-off with the blue and white walls, and the background spots made specifically for selfie-posing. In fact, a browse through the shops – mostly fashion boutiques with sky-high-crazy prices – will leave you very impressed with their product displays and merchandise.

For us, a stand out brand has got to be Nile Eyewear; a local eyewear brand vying to dominate the Egyptian market as a worthy competition to international brands. The year-round sun has us all investing in sunglasses, with a lot of us preferring the major designer brands; but let’s face it: dolling out an easy 4k on glasses has got to hurt given our struggling economy and rising prices. So, going local is not only economical, but also worthwhile since Nile boast competitive prices, high quality materials and impressive packaging that makes you feel like you’re buying something super valuable.

Located at the main entrance to the Lakeyard maze of shops, Nile Eyewear has an attractive, economic space with white display stands and a colourful collection of sunglasses and eyeglasses for men, women and kids. At the time of our visit, the shop was full of people, most of whom were kids and pre-teens excitedly trying on their age-appropriate collection of aviators with brightly coloured frames.

We immediately ate our words about local being cheaper when the first frames we picked up were a Jackie O inspired ‘Elite’ pair priced at 4350LE. Other Elite glasses were slightly more affordable, including funky gold-hued metallic frames matched with blue at 2450LE and an imposing gold frame with sharp rectangular edges at just under 4000LE, which made us feel very gangster and hip-hop video appropriate.

While we had fun playing around with the various shapes and materials, we ended up picking a pink frame with cat eye shapes for 1150LE. Our purchase was packaged in a hard-back glasses container, which works well for us as we tend to throw our glasses into our handbags and this particular frame looked a little delicate for our rough handling. Our only complaint is that we received a pair right off the display counter instead of a brand new, untouched pair, which we would have preferred, but given the busy nature of the shop, we preferred rushing out to making a complaint.

As for kids’ frames, Nile Eyewear has brightly coloured frames for both boys and girls ranging around 300LE, and they all seem to have thick plastic to avoid being broken easily. The men’s collection is a lot less flamboyant and colourful than the women’s with more solid frames and mostly black lenses and frames, and prices range from 300LE to almost 4000LE for their elite collection.

Nile Eyewear’s founder, Ahmed Hani, as on hand at the shop to talk everyone through their purchases and pitch to even young teens about the benefits of buying a local brand like theirs. While we didn’t have the chance for some one-on-one with the man behind the brand, we noted their no-returns-and-exchanges policy and made sure that we were happy with our purchase. We’d recommend Nile Eyewear as a somewhat cheaper alternative to the Prada’s and Gucci’s saturating our market these days, and it’s nice to look somewhat different to the rest while helping a local brand grow.