About

Our Story begins in El⁠-⁠Heri Chekka, Lebanon…

I grew up in Lebanon, where my family would spend summers at the beach. Every morning, my mother would pack up my two sisters and me in the car, stop by the ice maker to pick up a block of ice for the cooler, and head twenty kilometers south of Tripoli to a small town called Heri, where we would spend the whole day at the beach.

We were about six to eight kids who saw each other every day, and one of the most enjoyable and memorable things we used to do as a group was grab two HASSKEHs to play a game we called ATTACK. The goal of the game was to split the gang into two teams, assign someone to paddle, and have the others come up with a strategy to flip the other team’s HASSKEH. There was a lot of paddling, swimming, and fun as everyone tried to get onto the other team’s hasskeh to flip it.

These memories have stayed with me throughout my life, and during a visit to Lebanon in 2021, I asked myself, “Why don’t we have HASSKEHs all around the world for everyone to enjoy?” Furthermore, why don’t we have inflatable HASSKEHs to make them more portable and versatile?  With that thought in mind, I set out on a mission to create something special, and after a year and a half of research and a few prototypes, I believe I have come up with the HASSKEH of the future.

Additionally, while in Lebanon, my wife, who is always searching for meaningful charities to support, discovered an alarming number of children who are malnourished and go to bed hungry every night.

When it came time to create HASSKEH’s mission statement, we decided on “Traditional Style, Modern Impact”. We also decided to run HASSKEH as a bootstrap operation. This allows us to minimize all company operating expenses and cover costs, while maximizing what we can contribute from our online sales to fund our social mission of feeding as many kids as possible worldwide, starting with kids in Lebanon.

We created HASSKEH.COM to sell HASSKEH’s online and also created HASSKEH.ORG, a sister website that will be responsible for the distribution, tracking, and reporting of all pledged funds, strictly focusing on feeding hungry children around the world.

Please join us in this endeavor; you’ll have fun paddling around on a unique, traditional-style HASSKEH iSUP while knowing that your purchase also helped hungry kids worldwide, making a huge impact on today’s world.

Karim Raad
Founder