Beauty & PersonalCare

Cosmetics and personal care products are regulated goods in the Gulf. In the UAE a product is registered with Dubai Municipality before it can be sold; Saudi Arabia has its own notification regime; and everywhere the line between a cosmetic and a medicine is policed in the advertising, not just on the label. A moisturiser may claim to hydrate; it may not claim to treat. We therefore start every engagement with the approved claim set and write outward from it. Creative that ignores this gets rewritten by a compliance officer eventually — better to write it properly the first time.

We are sceptical about influencer spending, and we say so early. Paid influencer activity in the UAE requires a licence and 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, but a beauty brand lives on repeat purchase. Where influencer work earns its keep — usually fewer, longer arrangements with people whose audience genuinely buys — we run it well. Where it does not, we will tell you the money is better spent on search, retail activation or retention, even though that answer is less exciting in a planning meeting.

Beauty in the Gulf is still bought in pharmacies, mall retail and on the big marketplaces, and most brands should respect that. Direct-to-consumer looks like independence and often behaves like an expensive habit: paid acquisition in a crowded auction, last-mile delivery, cash-on-delivery refusals, discounting to strangers who never come back. Our usual advice is to earn distribution first — retail listings, marketplace presence done properly — and to treat your own storefront as a retention channel for customers you have already won. When the economics genuinely favour DTC-first, we will say so; they do less often than the success stories suggest.

Our view of DTC is not theoretical. We operate Wearon Studio, our own apparel brand, on a full direct-to-consumer stack — storefront, payments, cash on delivery, courier management, email and WhatsApp retention — and running it has taught us what the dashboards understate: the costs that arrive after the sale, the point at which paid acquisition stops paying, how much of retention is simply doing the boring things on time. Apparel is not skincare, but the stack and the discipline transfer directly, and 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, but we do not do the filings ourselves. We are not your distributor, and we do not formulate product. Within our management consultancy practice, the applied-AI work is useful in this category for the unglamorous middle — catalogue data, content production at sane cost, retention analytics — and we will tell you honestly where a tool helps and where it is a distraction.

If your product is undifferentiated and the plan is to outspend everyone on Instagram, we would rather say so in the first meeting than after the budget is gone. Where the product is good and the channels are chosen soberly, beauty in the GCC rewards patience, and we are comfortable working at that pace.