The hamoor is the most ordinary fish in the Gulf. You can find it in any fish market in Manama or Muharraq on any morning of the week. It's been a staple of Gulf cuisine for centuries — grilled, stewed, served whole with rice. Everyone in the region has eaten it. Nobody thinks of it as exotic.

Which is exactly why we made it a designer toy.

The brief we set ourselves when we started Hamoor was: take something completely familiar from daily Gulf life — something so common it's almost invisible — and treat it like an art object. Not because the fish is glamorous. Because the act of looking carefully at the ordinary is the whole point of design.

This is a tradition with a long history. Andy Warhol made paintings of soup cans because the soup can is the most American object in any American kitchen. Hong Kong artists make figures out of taxi drivers and noodle vendors. The principle is the same: the design power is in the recognition. You don't need to explain what a hamoor is to anyone from the Gulf. They already know. Putting it on a shelf, sculpted, in a limited production run, is what shifts the meaning.

The design choices

Hamoor isn't a realistic fish. He's a character — a 25cm molded PVC piece with a specific silhouette, a deliberate stance, and a face that registers as personality, not anatomy. Getting that balance right took the entire first batch to figure out. By Batch 2, we knew the proportions worked. Batch 3, which is open now, refines a few details we wanted to clean up.

A few things we cared about most:

The silhouette has to read from across a room. If you can't tell what Hamoor is from six meters away, the design has failed. Designer toys are shelf objects — they live at distance for most of their life, viewed up close only occasionally. Silhouette is everything.

The finish has to feel intentional. Cheap vinyl gives itself away in the seams and the surface texture. We went with high-grade molded PVC and hand-finishing because the piece needed to feel premium in the hand, not just look premium in a photograph.

The character has to be likeable but not cute. There's a kind of designer toy that goes too far into kawaii territory — big eyes, soft features, infinite cuteness. That wasn't right for Hamoor. He needed to have some dignity. He's a working fish, after all.

Why people connect to him

The reviews on Hamoor's product page have a phrase we keep seeing: "feels refined." Not "cute," not "fun," not "cool." Refined. That's the word we kept aiming for in the design. People are picking it up.

It's also worth noting who's collecting. Most of the people who've bought a Hamoor across Batches 1 and 2 live in the Gulf. They aren't buying him as an exotic object. They're buying him because they recognize him, and the recognition is part of the pleasure. A Bahraini collector seeing a Hamoor on a shelf in a friend's house has a different relationship to the piece than a Berlin collector does. Both relationships are valid. The piece works in both contexts.

Where to from here

Batch 3 is the third production run of Hamoor. We don't know yet whether there'll be a fourth, and if there is, when it'll be. Each batch funds the next. The question we keep asking ourselves is whether we'd rather make more Hamoors or move on to the next character. The honest answer is: both, in time.

Pre-order Hamoor — Batch 3 →