Ahmed Helmy, business development manager at Amr Helmy Designs and founder of Korsagy: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Ahmed Helmy (LinkedIn), business development manager at Amr Helmy Designs and founder of Korsagy.

My name is Ahmed Amr Helmy and I’m the business development manager at Amr Helmy Designs (AHD). That’s my official title, but my daily role is doing a little bit of everything and being involved in several roles and functions of the organization. I’m involved in marketing, I work on technical drawings for our designs, I meet clients, and I’m very hands-on with visiting sites to make sure our work is being implemented correctly.

Amr Helmy Designs is a household name for avant-garde furniture, especially kitchen designs. My father, Amr Helmy, started the business more than 40 years ago — almost by accident. His dream was to be an architect, but he studied Applied Arts instead. While he was in university, he designed a kitchen for his mother, Nadia, and her friends were so impressed by the design being ahead of its time that they began asking him to design new kitchens for them, too. That’s how it started. Now, AHD works to embody different cultures: We have a zen kitchen inspired by Asian design, a Greek-inspired kitchen, and the Bauhaus German kitchen.

I’m really interested in and driven by high-technology ideas. My latest creation for AH Haute Couture, a division of AHD, is a voice-automated wardrobe that I just launched and presented at an exhibition last week, actually. AH Haute Coutures is all about fashion-inspired wardrobes infused with high-tech functionality, including the voice automation feature, hidden magnetic locks, and fingerprint-activated units. The design is a wardrobe with a coded carousel that can be customized with your belongings and will bring you a specific piece of clothing that you ask for through a voice-automated application. I’ve also designed a shoe rack with a similar functionality.

I really love taking normal, everyday pieces of furniture and taking them to the next level with technology, which is always evolving and is truly interesting to me. I founded Korsagy, which was born out of my passion for chair design — besides high-tech applications in home solutions. My designs for Korsagy are very much inspired by Danish furniture designer Hans Wegner, who is perhaps the pioneer of modern but functional furniture design.

We also recently started an interior design studio, although we haven’t formally announced it yet. We do residential, commercial, and retail projects through the studio, along with product design and event design.

Each person in the family has also branched out a little with their own subset of the business. One of my brothers, Mostafa, founded ZeroChemia, AHD’s environmentally conscious side, which has a wide range of products with zero chemical additives in the entire production process. My sister, Malak, set up a concept store named HELMY that feeds off AHD’s cultural element by focusing on the consecutive cultures that have been in Egypt, which are expressed in the store’s furniture, fashion, and art products. And finally, my youngest brother, Hussein, worked with my mother to establish Bayty, a sister company that brings together all the elements of the organization and the family’s subsets into a mini boutique hotel studio experience.

I wake up at 8am and my daily routine starts with a hot bath every morning. Not a shower, a bath. It’s become increasingly important for me to clear my head in the morning and set the tone for the day, so I also spend time before I head out to work to have a coffee — usually alone, or with my wife, Malak. I get to the office every day at 9am and start by catching up on the news by reading Enterprise, and then I start working through my to-do list.

I have the world’s shortest and best commute — I live right next door to our office and showroom space in Maadi, so it takes less than one minute door-to-door [laughs]. The upside of this is obviously the time saved on commuting at the beginning and end of the day, but the downside is also the appearance of around-the-clock availability because I’m so close.

To be honest, my experience with work-life balance is that I often end up prioritizing work because I’m so heavily involved in our family business. But I like to disconnect with sci-fi movies and immersing myself in anything high-tech. I don’t really like watching typical movies or anything that depicts life as we know it. I usually like to venture beyond what I know and what’s outside the box, whether with the books I read or the shows and movies I watch.

The last great thing I watched was Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I also recently read Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger, which I really enjoyed.

My favorite piece of advice that I’ve received and like to give others is to take a break every now and then. And in the break, break a leg.