Handmade in Lahore, rooted in Urdu letterforms.

How We Started

From a rooftop in Anarkali to your desk.

Remtem began on a rooftop off Anarkali Bazaar, where our founder started carving Urdu letterforms into printing blocks between architecture classes. What began as a stack of hand-pressed Haroof notebooks made for friends slowly turned into requests, then orders, then a proper studio — first one printing table, then three, then a small crew of block-printers, stitchers and letterers.

"Haroof" is the Urdu word for letters, and it's stayed the name of our very first collection — individual Urdu characters carved as standalone block prints, one letterform at a time. It set the tone for everything that came after: designs pulled directly from Nastaliq calligraphy, not filtered through a Western idea of what "South Asian" is supposed to look like.

Six years on, the process hasn't really changed. We still carve our own blocks, mix our own ink, and press every sheet of kraft paper by hand — which is slower than a factory run, and exactly the point.