A machta's list: what she restocks, and what she keeps

This page is not written for a bride. It is written for the machta — the maâllma who dresses several brides in one season, and who loads a car for one wedding before loading it again for the next. A kit list built for a single night is no use to her. What she needs is the split: what comes back from the wedding, and what does not.

The trade itself is old. The machta advises on the trousseau, prepares the hammam, applies the henna, runs the sequence of the evening and dresses the bride from head to ankles. The buying is not old at all: she markets herself through online platforms, and she orders from a phone between two clients. Every quantity below is the real pack size on a page of this catalogue, not a trade convention repeated from memory.

Capital and consumables

A machta's kit plans in two registers, and only one of them is bought again.

Capital is what comes out of the case at every wedding and goes back into it at the end of the night: the bride's jewellery, the trays, the jewellery case, the garment bags and hangers, the light string on the backdrop. Bought once and spread across every bride of the season, then across the seasons after it. Worn for the ceremony, wiped and stored dry, a piece from this register goes through the season.

Consumables are what leaves with the guests, what gets lost in a hall, and what a new colour makes unusable: pins, combs, favour bags, gift boxes, chair sashes, the second and third mefrech colour. This register is recounted before every wedding, and it is the one that decides the spring order.

Count the two separately. Mixed together they produce an order that looks large and still runs out of pins at the second wedding.

What comes back from every wedding

• The bride's jewellery — the parure, the khit errouh, the taj, the mahzma, the khelkhal. They move from one bride to the next: the heaviest line in the kit and the one renewed least often.
• The trays. Three nesting siniya stack inside one another and take the boot space of one.
• The jewellery case, zipped and compartmented: the house, then the hairdresser, then the hall, then home again.
• Garment bags and hangers for the outfits — a subject of its own, and not this page's.
• The light string on the backdrop, rigged the night before and taken down at the end.

Two details in this register change the buying decision. The trays are acrylic: they travel well, but they scratch faster than glass, so a cloth goes between two stacked trays and nothing hot goes on top. And the light string runs on USB, off a phone charger or a power bank set behind the decor — there is no battery box to reopen in the middle of the tasdira.

What does not come back

• Bun pins. Some of them are always still in the carpet of the hall.
• Combs, which bend, tangle at the bottom of a case and end up short of a tooth.
• Organza favour bags, which are the gift itself and by definition never return.
• Gift boxes for the tyafer and the tbek: they stay with the bride, along with what was in them.
• The second and third mefrech colour, which is an addition rather than a replacement.
• Chair sashes — the borderline case: they wash and come back from one wedding to the next, but they are ordered by colour and by the size of the room, so they are rebought for each new accord rather than through wear.

One point of vocabulary on that last line, because these are two articles at two prices: the sash is the satin band tied over the chair back, the cover is the stretch sleeve the chair goes into. Sashes are ordered in multiples of ten in a single colour; covers are not included with them.

Quantities per night, not per bride

A pack is not judged on how many pieces it holds but on how many evenings it carries. These are this catalogue's pack sizes and what each one covers.

What is bought	Pack	What it covers
Bun pins	Set of 30	A whole night, the attendants' hair included
Veil and bun combs	Set of 6	Two set symmetrically, and enough to swap without undoing the chignon
Earrings	Set of 4 pairs	Several outfits of one night, or several brides of one season
Siniya	3 nesting trays	The stations of the night, stacked inside one another for the drive
Siniya cloths (mefrech)	Set of 6, one colour	Trays redressed at every change of outfit
Attar bottles	Set of 12, one colour	The perfume station lined up on the siniya
Organza favour bags	Pack of 100	Filled the night before, stored flat in a crate
Gift boxes	Pack of 10, flat-packed	The tyafer and the tbek, one piece per box
Chair sashes	Pack of 10	The throne, the two mothers' chairs and the front row

Three rows need explaining, because that is where the count per night parts company with the count per bride.

Thirty pins, not fifteen. The chignon is rebuilt at every change of the tasdira, and it is not alone: the attendants are done too, and they appear in the same photographs. Thirty cover the whole night, their hair included. Fifteen would be a pack counted per bride; this one is counted per night.

Six combs for two positions. An ornamental comb is not a comb for combing: it drives into the chignon and becomes the anchor point. It holds the veil for the white dress, and it replaces the veil with a jewel for the traditional changes. It comes out and goes back in without undoing the hair, which a sewn-on piece cannot do. Six is enough to set two symmetrically either side of the bun and keep some back for the next change.

Four pairs of earrings, because earrings are what turn over. The bride changes outfit three to seven times through the night, and nobody redoes the whole parure at every change. What changes is the earrings: with the hair up, they are what reads in photographs and on video from the back of the room. A pack of four covers several outfits of one night — or several brides of one season, which is the real calculation.

A second accord before a second tray

When a kit grows, the first useful spend is almost never a second tray. It is a second tone.

Here that tone is called the accord, it follows the bride's outfit, and the FAQ says which tone goes with which. What the FAQ does not say is what one more accord costs a stock and what it returns — and that is the only question in play when the season's order is being written.

The mefrech is where this shows fastest. The cloth is what the photographs see; the tray is only what holds it up. The set arrives as six pieces in one colour, so a second colour does not add six pieces to a stock — it adds a whole evening the current stock cannot dress. That is why a colour is rebought before a siniya is.

The peak is summer, so the buying is done in spring

Wedding season in Algeria is summer, and the Algerian press writes it in those words rather than leaving it to be inferred. For the machta it shows up in her own diary: the work thickens in summer, demand rises, and appointments are booked against wedding dates rather than taken as they come.

The buying consequence is simple. A season's order decided in July is decided too late, because by July the dates are already taken and nobody recounts pins between two clients. The moment to recount the consumables, the mefrech colours and the packs of ten is spring — before the first bride of the summer is written in.

This is not a delivery-time question: the lead time is shown as a real date for your wilaya, and the FAQ answers it directly. This is the other question — deciding once, calmly, what will be consumed across the whole season.

What we never restock here

Two words appear on every list of the Algerian bride and have no page in this catalogue: the skhab and the meskia.

The skhab is not a metal jewel: it is a scented necklace built from cloves, ambergris and musk, and it is named among the adornments of the Constantine bride. The meskia, Tlemcen in origin, is a pendant filled with ambergris and musk. Both belong to another trade than ours — the perfumer's — and we do not sell them.

We name them on this page all the same, because a machta looking for either deserves a clear answer rather than a silence she could read as a stock. What we sell is plated metal, rhinestone, glass and cloth. For the skhab and the meskia, go to the traditional perfume sellers.

What is rented, and what we do not rent

Outfits are rented, and that is the norm: the Algerian press describes tasdira dresses rented against a deposit and returned the next morning. The accessories are a different matter here: this catalogue sells them and does not rent them — not the earrings, the pins, the combs, the trays, the mefrech or the favour bags. They are consumed, or lost, or they sit too close to skin and hair to be passed from one client to the next.

That is why a kit of accessories does not compare to a rented wardrobe. It is not the same spend, not the same duration and not the same trade: the outfit is rented, and everything that holds it, sits on it and is handed out around it is, here, bought.

A season ordered well comes down to two moves. Recount the register that gets consumed, and add to the register that stays one element at a time — most often one more accord.