Beauty and Personal Care

Cosmetics and personal care products are regulated goods in the Gulf. In the UAE a product is registered with the municipality before it can be sold, Saudi Arabia has its own notification process, and everywhere the line between a cosmetic and a medicine is policed in the advertising as well as on the label. A moisturiser may claim to hydrate. It may not claim to treat. We therefore start every engagement with the approved set of claims and write outward from there, because creative that ignores this is rewritten by a compliance officer eventually, and it is cheaper to write it properly the first time.

We are sceptical about influencer spending, and we say so early. Paid influencer work in the UAE requires a licence and clear disclosure, which removes the fiction that it is word of mouth. What remains is media buying, and it should be judged as media buying. A post is priced on reach, while a beauty brand lives on repeat purchase. Where influencer work earns its keep, usually through fewer and longer arrangements with people whose audience genuinely buys, we run it well. Where it does not, we will say the money is better spent on search, retail activity or keeping existing customers, even though that answer is less exciting in a planning meeting.

Beauty in the Gulf is still bought in pharmacies, in mall retail and on the large marketplaces, and most brands should respect that. Selling directly looks like independence and often behaves like an expensive habit, with paid advertising in a crowded auction, delivery costs, orders refused at the door and discounts offered to strangers who never come back. Our usual advice is to earn distribution first, through retail listings and a marketplace presence done properly, and to treat your own shop as a way of keeping the customers you have already won. When the numbers genuinely favour selling direct first, we will say so, and that happens less often than the success stories suggest.

Our view of selling direct is not theoretical. We run wearon.co, our own apparel brand, on a full direct to consumer setup, including the shop, payments, cash on delivery, courier management and email and messaging to existing customers. Running it has taught us what the dashboards understate, namely the costs that arrive after the sale, the point at which paid advertising stops paying, and how much of customer retention is simply doing the dull things on time. Apparel is not skincare, and the setup and the discipline transfer directly, so we bring an operator's caution to a category that mostly hears an agency's optimism.

We are equally clear about what we are not. We are not a cosmetics regulatory consultancy. We plan launches around registration timelines and work alongside whoever handles your filings, and we do not make those filings ourselves. We are not your distributor, and we do not formulate products. Within our consultancy practice, work on artificial intelligence is useful in this category for the unglamorous middle, such as catalogue data, producing content at a sensible cost and understanding retention, and we will tell you honestly where a tool helps and where it is a distraction.

If your product is much like everything else on the shelf and the plan is to outspend everyone on social media, we would rather say so in the first meeting than after the budget has gone. Where the product is good and the channels are chosen soberly, beauty in the Gulf rewards patience, and we are comfortable working at that pace.

Reviews and photographs do more work in this category than most advertising does. A shopper comparing two serums reads what other people said, looks at the ingredient list and checks whether the pictures match what arrives. We help brands ask for reviews properly, answer the critical ones in public, and produce photography that shows the texture and the packaging honestly, because a flattering image that misleads costs more in returns than it earns in orders.

The retailer sets terms that decide whether a season works. Listing fees, promotional calendars, minimum stock levels and the cost of in-store activity all take their share before marketing takes its own. We look at those numbers with you before agreeing a media budget, because a plan that ignores them tends to fund someone else's promotion.