In early 2020 the malls in Qatar closed. Mayoral, the Spanish kids’ fashion brand I was running marketing for at 2Point, had a season of stock, a loyal customer base, and no counter to sell it over. There was no e-commerce. There was no budget for an agency to build one.
So I built it myself.
What did the brief actually say?
Nothing, really. The brief was a closed door. But underneath it were three facts that mattered more than any plan: the customers already loved the product, we already had their numbers from years of in-store promotions, and nobody else in the category had moved yet.
That is a brand problem before it is a technology problem. The job was not “build a website”. The job was “make it as easy to buy Mayoral from the sofa as it was from the shop”.
What did I do?
- Built the store end to end. Product data, photography from the catalogue, collections, delivery and payment. One person, evenings included.
- Launched to the people we already had. SMS campaigns to the existing customer list did the first wave of selling. No ad spend, no algorithm, just a message from a brand they trusted.
- Ran promotions on a calendar. New collection, seasonal sale, Eid. Each one had a reason to come back, and each one was planned against the sales data from the week before.
- Spent small and sharp. The paid budget was QAR 3,800 a month. That forces you to target properly, test a handful of creatives, and kill what does not work by Thursday.
- Used influencers as reach, not decoration. A few well-chosen collaborations with Qatar parents did more for traffic than any banner.
What did the numbers say?
The store averaged QAR 120,000 a month in revenue against that QAR 3,800 ad budget. That is roughly thirty times the spend, before counting the organic and SMS orders that cost nothing at all. Cost per revenue stayed low enough that the question stopped being “can we afford to advertise” and became “how fast can we restock”.
What would I tell anyone doing this now?
- Own the customer list. Every promotion I had run in-store for two years became the launch audience. Collect names on day one, even if you have no idea what you will do with them.
- Small budgets are a feature. They make you choose. Most of the waste in paid media comes from having enough money to avoid choosing.
- The store is marketing. Load speed, photography, the checkout, the delivery promise. Nobody separates those from the brand, so neither should you.
- Read the numbers weekly, not monthly. A month is long enough to lose a season. A week is long enough to learn.
The pandemic forced the move. The habits it taught, small budgets, owned audiences, weekly reading of the data, are the ones I still run on.
Nihaad Shaikh is Head of Marketing at UFC Gym, UAE · Qatar · Kuwait. See the work or say hello.