In December 2008 Rhimal initiated its incubator activities with the first Egypt Design + Industry Workshop in partnership with the Egyptian Furniture Export Council and the Istituto Europeo di Design Centro Ricerche (IED) in Milan.  This workshop is the first of a series of similar workshops that bring young local designers and manufacturers in direct collaborative contact with experienced international designers as a means of transforming the local industrial design discourse towards international relevance. In this workshop 8 international designers, 20 young Egyptian designers and 21 furniture manufacturers participated. The objectives include:

The designers worked through a three phase process with the companies to develop a number of prototypes that attempted to reflect a new language for ‘design from Egypt’. The outputs of the workshop were featured in the Milan International Furniture Fair in April 2009 under a new brand name of “KYME”. This brand name and its identity were developed through a communication design workshop that was conducted parallel to the design workshop and involved another group of international experts and local communication designers. A second exhibition was organized in Furnex in Cairo in June of the same year.