Discarded denim is being rewoven into hand-made tapestries at a storefront on Bedford Avenue, where weaver Mahmoud Kosyaem reroutes donated jeans from roughly ten denim mills, including AGI Denim, away from landfills and onto his loom. AGI Denim has described its early collaboration with Mahmoud as the project that first introduced his weaving to the denim industry, an effort the mill says went on to inspire similar reuse initiatives elsewhere in the supply chain and to feed a broader push toward reducing the waste footprint tied to how the industry presents its products.
That initiative operates out of Sarab, a community space and shop at 368 Bedford Ave founded in 2025 by Mahmoud, a fiber artist whose family has practiced weaving in Aleppo, Syria, for more than 150 years, and in Urfa, Turkey, for 600 years before that. Beyond the denim tapestries, the venue pairs Arabic and Turkish coffee service with beginner-friendly tapestry weaving workshops held Friday through Sunday, an approach designed to make a generations-old craft approachable to newcomers rather than confined to specialists or collectors.
Central to the concept is a custom-built loom capable of seating twenty weavers simultaneously, a structure Mahmoud designed specifically to turn a traditionally solitary practice into a group activity. Workshops are bring-your-own-beverage and include all materials, with participants leaving with a finished piece they wove themselves. The format has drawn attention on social media, where short-form videos of the sessions have circulated across Instagram and Facebook, introducing the space to audiences well beyond Williamsburg.
Beyond the workshops, the shop operates daily into the evening hours and sells a curated inventory that includes handmade and antique rugs, Syrian olive oil soaps and goods from local artisans, positioning Sarab as both a retail destination and a gathering point for the neighborhood.
Mahmoud’s credentials extend well past the shop floor. Described as a world-renowned fiber artist, his tapestries have been exhibited internationally, including at the Al Shindagha Museum in Dubai and at Kadras Contemporary. As a longtime rug salesman, he has amassed a personal collection of thousands of handmade rugs and carpets over the years, giving him what associates describe as an encyclopedic knowledge of the global rug trade, its regional weaving traditions and the provenance markers that distinguish authentic pieces from reproductions.
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That expertise is inseparable from a family lineage that spans two countries and multiple centuries. The Kosyaem family’s weaving tradition took root in Urfa before migrating to Aleppo, where it continued for a century and a half, a history that situates Sarab within a broader story of craft preservation amid displacement across the Middle East. Mahmoud has described drawing inspiration from each country he has lived in and each community he has encountered along the way, framing the Brooklyn space as an extension of that pattern rather than a departure from it.
The Williamsburg location marks Mahmoud’s attempt to translate that inherited expertise into a format accessible to people with no prior weaving experience, an intentional contrast to the specialized, often insular world of professional textile artistry and antique rug dealing in which he has spent his career. By building a large communal loom rather than individual stations, he has tied the technical act of weaving directly to socializing, positioning the craft as a vehicle for community-building rather than solely an artistic or commercial pursuit.
The retail side of the business draws on the same lineage. Mahmoud’s inventory of handmade and antique rugs reflects decades spent in the trade, and that background lets him speak to customers about a rug’s origin, materials and construction. Pairing that inventory with Syrian olive oil soaps and goods from local artisans keeps the shop’s offerings rooted in the same cultural traditions that inform the workshops upstairs.
Mahmoud continues to run the space as both owner and master weaver, overseeing workshops alongside retail operations. For now, the model remains concentrated in a single Bedford Avenue storefront, with growth tied to deepening the weekend workshop schedule rather than opening additional locations.