A honest conversation about what goes into the pieces you wear — and what gets left out when quality isn't the priority.
I want to tell you something that most brands won't say out loud.
When we were building Ayesha's Collection, I spent months going back and forth between suppliers. Some of them were offering me fabric at prices that would have made our margins look very comfortable. The math was tempting, genuinely. Lower cost of goods, higher profit, more room to run promotions, more room to compete on price.
I ordered samples. I held the fabric. I wore a hijab made from it for a single afternoon.
And I knew immediately that we weren't going to use it.
This article is about that decision — and every decision like it that we've made since we launched in 2023. It's about why we source the way we do, what it actually costs us, and why I believe that for our customers — Muslim women living their lives in America — cutting corners on fabric is never actually a saving. Not really. Not when you add it all up.
First, Let Me Be Honest About What "Cheap Fabric" Actually Means
There's a version of this conversation that turns into a lecture, and I don't want to do that. You're adults. You've bought clothing before. You know that there's a difference between a $12 hijab and a $38 hijab.
What I want to talk about is why that difference exists — because it's not always obvious from a product photo.
When a hijab or abaya is priced very low, something had to give somewhere. Sometimes it's the labor — and that's a conversation about ethics that deserves its own article. But very often, the first thing that gets sacrificed is the fabric itself.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
A low-grade polyester hijab can look beautiful in a flat-lay photo. It photographs well. It looks smooth, it looks neat, it looks like it could be the exact same thing as a higher-priced alternative. Then you wear it on a day when it's 85 degrees in Houston, or you sit through a three-hour family gathering, or you spend a full day at work — and you feel it immediately. The fabric doesn't breathe. It traps heat against your scalp. By midday you're uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with hijab itself and everything to do with the material wrapped around your head.
That's not a hijab problem. That's a fabric problem.
Or consider an abaya in a thin, cheap crepe that looks elegant hanging on a hanger and falls apart at the seams after four months of regular wear. The color starts to fade after six washes. The hem frays. You paid less upfront, but now you're buying another one — and another one after that.
This is what I mean when I say cheap alternatives are a false economy. The low price isn't a saving. It's a deferral.
What We Actually Look for When We Source Fabric
When I started building Ayesha's Collection, I didn't come from the fashion industry. I came from being a customer — a frustrated one — and that shaped everything about how we approach sourcing.
I wasn't asking "what's the cheapest fabric we can sell at a reasonable margin?" I was asking "what would I actually want to wear?" and then working backward from there.
That led us to prioritize a few things above everything else.
Performance in real conditions. This sounds obvious but it's actually not how most modest fashion sourcing decisions get made. A lot of decisions get made based on how fabric looks and handles in a warehouse or showroom. We make decisions based on how fabric performs on a woman who is living her life — going to work, picking up kids, attending Jumu'ah, running errands in July, sitting through a long Eid dinner.
Breathability matters enormously for hijabs. Modal became one of our go-to fabrics because it genuinely performs differently from most alternatives — it's softer than cotton, more moisture-absorbent, and has a natural drape that makes it easier to wear without constant readjusting. These aren't marketing claims. They're the reason I kept reaching for the modal samples over and over when I was testing.
For abayas, weight and drape are everything. A fabric that's too stiff makes an abaya look structured in a way that reads as costume rather than clothing. A fabric that's too thin compromises modesty — which, for an abaya, is rather the whole point. Finding the balance took time and a lot of rejected samples.
Longevity. This is the one that most directly challenges the false economy argument. When we're evaluating a fabric, one of the questions we ask is: what does this look like after 50 washes? After a year of regular wear?
A hijab you wear twice a week goes through the wash over 100 times a year. If the color is going to fade by wash 30, or the fabric is going to pill by wash 20, that matters — not just for quality reasons but for honest pricing reasons. A hijab that lasts two years at $38 is cheaper than a hijab that lasts six months at $18. That math is simple, but it's math that rarely gets surfaced in a product listing.
How it feels against skin. This is personal and it's also practical. Many of our customers wear hijab all day, every day. The fabric is in contact with their skin — their face, their neck, their hairline — for hours at a time. If a fabric is scratchy, stiff, or irritating, that's not a minor inconvenience. It's a daily discomfort. We reject fabrics that feel fine in a quick test but become uncomfortable over extended wear.
The Conversation I Keep Having With Suppliers
Here's something that might surprise you: finding suppliers who share our priorities is genuinely difficult.
Most fabric suppliers are optimized for volume and margin. When you're a small business — which we still are, two years in — you don't have the purchasing power to demand the same terms as a large retailer. You're often not the most attractive customer in the room.
What we've found is that the suppliers worth working with are the ones who understand what you're trying to do and care about it. We've had conversations with suppliers who pushed back on our quality standards, told us we were being unrealistic, or offered to "meet us in the middle" in ways that would have required us to compromise on the things we didn't want to compromise on.
We said no to those suppliers.
We've also found suppliers who got it immediately — who took our questions about fabric performance seriously, who offered to send multiple samples, who told us honestly when a fabric we were interested in wouldn't hold up the way we needed it to. Those are the relationships we've built and continued to invest in.
It costs more. It takes longer. It means we sometimes can't move as fast as we'd like to when expanding the range. But it means that when something leaves our store and arrives at your door, we can stand behind it.
What This Means for Price — and Why I Won't Apologize for It
I know that our prices are not the lowest in the modest fashion market. I want to be straightforward about that.
There are places you can buy a hijab for $8. I understand why that's appealing, especially if you're buying multiple at once, or if budget is a real constraint. I'm not going to pretend that price doesn't matter or that everyone has the same financial flexibility.
What I will say is this: we price our pieces the way we do because that's what it costs to make them the way we make them. We don't have hidden margins we're protecting. We're a small business that launched in 2023 and is still growing. What you pay covers the fabric we chose after rejecting cheaper alternatives, the production standards we insist on, and the customer experience we try to deliver every time.
I've watched customers come to us after years of cycling through cheaper options — buying three or four hijabs a year that disappoint them in different ways, spending more in total than they would have on one piece they loved and kept for two years. That's the false economy I'm talking about. It's not abstract. It's the actual experience of a lot of Muslim women who've been underserved by a market that treated them as an afterthought.
We're trying to be something different.
One More Thing: Fabric and Faith
This might sound like a stretch, but I think about it genuinely, so I'll say it.
There's something that feels right to me about the connection between how we dress for modesty and the quality of what we use to do it. Modesty in Islamic practice is an act of intention — it's not just about covering, it's about the meaning behind the covering. Doing it with fabric that's uncomfortable, that falls apart quickly, that was made without care — it's not congruent with the intention behind it.
I'm not saying everyone needs to buy expensive clothing to observe hijab correctly. That's not the point at all. The point is that when we have the ability to make something well — to choose fabric that respects the person wearing it, that was sourced with integrity, that will last — we should. That's what I believe, and it's what shapes how we build Ayesha's Collection piece by piece.
The Short Version, For the Skimmers
If you didn't read all of that, here's the summary:
We source the way we do because we've worn the cheap alternatives and they don't hold up — physically, functionally, or in terms of the daily experience of the women wearing them. Cheap fabric isn't a saving. It's a cost that gets paid later, in discomfort and replacement and disappointment.
We're a small business. We're still figuring things out. But this is one thing we're not willing to compromise on — and we don't intend to start.
If you have questions about any specific fabric we use, why we carry it, or how we tested it, feel free to reach out. We'd genuinely rather you asked than guessed.
Ayesha's Collection is an online hijab and abaya store based in the United States, founded in 2023. Every piece in our collection is chosen with the Muslim American woman's real life in mind. Shop at ayeshas-collection.com.