• Tropic of Linen Co-Founder Minha Akram on building a Sri Lankan fashion label slowly, one piece at a time

Eleven years of retail is a long time in fashion. Trends change, customers change, entire retail landscapes change, and in Sri Lanka, the last decade has brought with it considerably more change than most businesses would have reasonably expected to weather.

For Tropic of Linen, though, change has largely happened around a remarkably consistent idea. Linen has remained at the centre of the brand, as has its focus on making clothes specifically for the climate, bodies, and lifestyles of the people who wear them. 

Now, nearly 12 years after opening its first retail boutique, Tropic of Linen has entered perhaps its most significant new chapter yet with a second retail boutique opened recently at The Shoppes at City of Dreams, marking the first phase of broader expansion plans for a brand which has, until now, grown largely without fanfare.

For Co-Founder Minha Akram, looking back at Tropic of Linen’s retail journey brings with it one immediate reaction. 

“My main feeling looking back now is, ‘Where did all that time go?’” she said. “We’ve not been a brand that exploded out of nowhere and went from zero to hero. We’ve slowly built up the brand, our reputation, and customer base, and evolved in terms of design and adapting to a landscape that has changed quite dramatically over the last 10 years.”

Building a space for Sri Lankan fashion

When Tropic of Linen opened the doors to its first retail boutique in December 2014, Minha recalled, there had been considerably fewer purpose-built Sri Lankan fashion brands. Local shoppers often relied on excess stock from export manufacturing, while clothing consciously designed and produced for the Sri Lankan market was less common.

That has changed significantly over the past decade, accelerated in part by the pandemic and the resulting shift towards local businesses and products. For Tropic of Linen, this has meant adapting to an increasingly crowded local fashion space while remaining anchored to the principles with which the brand began.

Interestingly, one of those principles has become considerably more relevant with time. Linen was at the heart of Tropic of Linen long before conversations around natural fibres and more responsible approaches to fashion became as mainstream as they are today. 

Minha sees the intervening years as a story of the brand adapting to the world around it, while the wider fashion world has simultaneously moved closer to some of the ideas Tropic of Linen began with. “People are becoming more aware and leaning increasingly towards sustainable fabrics globally, and linen is one of the most sustainable fibres,” she said.

Minha’s own relationship with fashion stretches considerably further back than Tropic of Linen. As a teenager, she wanted to study fashion and spent much of her time sketching clothes, but eventually chose fine art at the University of Cape Town, also exploring jewellery design and manufacturing.

Fashion, she admitted, had felt intimidating at that age. After university came an events company, marketing, and advertising, followed several years later by meeting her husband and Tropic of Linen Co-Founder Shukran Salih. His family business, Cadillac Garments, was involved in apparel manufacturing, and Shukran was already working with linen, which was how the pieces for what would become Tropic of Linen began to come together. 

“When we got married, it seemed like a natural fit to put them together,” Minha said of their respective backgrounds. “I could design and create this, and that was when it started.”

The choice of linen initially emerged from Shukran’s familiarity with the material. He loved working with it, and Minha soon did too. For a designer, linen also presented an interesting challenge. Unlike fabrics containing stretch, it demands greater precision in pattern development and an understanding of how both fabric and bodies move. Developing a garment therefore takes time.

“Linen has this quality, sheen, and drape that is so beautiful,” Minha said. “It’s a challenge to work with from a design and pattern perspective. You need to really understand the fabric and the body.”

Designing for Lankan living

From the beginning, though, Tropic of Linen was about more than building a brand around a particular fabric. Minha and Shukran wanted to build something made in Sri Lanka, for Sri Lanka.

For years, Minha had noticed Sri Lankan consumers largely bought what was available. Finding something different or of higher quality often meant spending significantly more on imported clothing. Tropic of Linen’s intention was to create well-made linen clothing at a price Sri Lankan consumers would still be able to access.

“We don’t inflate our prices for the sake of it,” Minha said. “Linen is an expensive fabric, and we will always try to keep it as simple as we can. Our main purpose was to create something a Sri Lankan could access.”

That idea extended to the clothes themselves. Sri Lanka has its own climate, lifestyles, and social sensitivities around clothing. There are differences in body shape and complexion, and different expectations around what people feel comfortable wearing to work, during the day, or in the evening.

Tropic of Linen therefore resisted simply working from the standardised fits common in international fashion. “We’re built differently,” Minha said. “We have different complexions and body types, and socially speaking as well as climatically speaking, there are sensitivities in what we like to wear.”

This has made the design process more complicated. The brand develops different silhouettes with different proportions in mind rather than assuming that simply extending a single garment across a broader size range solves the problem of inclusivity.

“Everyone has different pressure points and sensitivities on what they like to wear and what they’re comfortable in,” Minha explained. “Some women might have smaller shoulders and larger hips. They shouldn’t have to squeeze into something that doesn’t work for them. Some don’t want to show their arms. Some have an hourglass figure and require a different fit.”

For Minha, inclusivity therefore means considering shape as much as size. “It’s not about being size-inclusive and going from size zero to 20, which we do, but also doing what works for those different sizes and proportions. We’re not built for the standard European fit that the world follows. Changing that standard was important.”

Growing without the noise

The same philosophy of making something that works in the long term has shaped Tropic of Linen’s growth. Minha does not describe the past 11 years through one defining breakthrough. There have instead been hundreds of smaller moments, from spending months perfecting a particular dress to finding the right people to join the team.

Then there are the customers. Stories of customers continuing to wear pieces bought years earlier are particularly meaningful for Minha. The day after the City of Dreams boutique opened, a family walked in and asked whether Tropic of Linen had once had a store at Wijerama Mawatha. They had visited years earlier, perhaps eight or 10 years ago, and still remembered it. 

“We get a lot of that kind of feedback, which is heartening,” she said. “Those are the real highlights of the journey. It happens more often than you think.”

The journey has taken place against an unusually difficult period for Sri Lankan businesses. The country’s successive crises brought shortages of raw materials, affordability pressures, and periods when customers simply did not have the spending power they once did.

There was rarely one ingenious solution, Minha reflected. Survival was more often about continuing, adjusting, and relying on the people around them. “We’ve had a lot of challenges during these last few years, from not having raw materials to challenges with people to not having customers because of affordability,” she said. “Overcoming it was about being slow and steady. It’s not always about a genius move.”

The team, the partnership between Minha and Shukran, and their wider family became central pillars through those periods. At the same time, the fashion marketplace itself became louder. Tropic of Linen has never spent heavily on advertising or marketing. Word of mouth drove much of its early growth, and Minha acknowledged that staying committed to this approach became harder as other brands entered the market with larger marketing pushes.

Yet this organic growth has also produced something distinctive. The brand has developed a customer base among international visitors who specifically seek it out, rather than encountering it incidentally while shopping in Sri Lanka. Minha pointed particularly to a substantial Indian clientele, with recommendations circulating between families and travellers.

For Minha, this is perhaps the clearest measure of what Tropic of Linen has built over 11 years. Its growth has come from people finding the clothes, liking them, returning, and telling someone else. That slow accumulation has now brought Tropic of Linen to City of Dreams.

The decision to enter a mall environment was not an obvious one for a brand whose original boutique was deliberately conceived to feel more like a home. Minha wanted customers to feel as though they were being welcomed in for dinner, an approach extending from the physical design of the store to the way customers were treated.

For the new boutique, the challenge was to translate that warmth into a considerably different environment without repeating the original store. 

Drawing on her fine art background and love of sculpture, Minha turned towards natural materials, contrasting fashion against forms drawn from the earth. Sculptural stone elements reference surfaces weathered by wind and nature, while an olive tree forms the centre of the boutique beneath a skylight.

For Minha, there is a relationship between those forms and linen itself. “Linen has a similar quality to how it fits you and moulds,” she said. “You wear it rather than it wearing you.” 

The result represents both where Tropic of Linen has come from and where Minha and Shukran hope to take it next. The City of Dreams boutique is the first phase of wider expansion plans, and Minha hopes more Tropic of Linen spaces will follow.

After more than a decade of slow growth, though, expansion is not about leaving behind the principles on which the brand was built. If anything, the challenge is taking those principles further without losing what made people return in the first place.

Eleven years later, Tropic of Linen is entering a larger stage. It is doing so much as it began, through linen, design, a distinctly Sri Lankan understanding of clothing, and the belief that growth does not always have to happen loudly.