The SME Story
Interviews with entrepreneurs and insights from experts on how the regional SME ecosystem is evolving
While Ben Kinerman-Daltrey saw potential to recruit sales professionals for SMEs, Zein Arbeed noticed the need for the UAE to get acquainted with high-end men’s grooming products. Drew Joshua Dennehy meanwhile changed careers and entered the coffee industry. Here are their stories What prompted you to start The Grooming Lab?
The idea to set it up came from a personal experience. My husband was growing his beard back in 2017 and I did not come across too many grooming products that would support his new look, thereby identifying a gap that resulted in the birth of The Grooming Lab. Also, men were not exposed to many grooming brands. The barbershops and pharmacies had more mass-market grooming brands, hence the gap for niche exclusive brands was available and ours to fulfil. Four years down the road, we now distribute four men’s brands covering all aspects of men’s grooming, from beard and shaving to hairstyling, and now more importantly, brands dedicated to men’s skincare.
Which are some of the key brands/products you are bringing to the region?
We started with the distribution of Captain Fawcett in 2017 that focused on beard grooming and shaving and which is sold in over 50 countries worldwide. Then in 2018, we looked at another niche barbering award-winning hairstyling brand called Dapper Dan from the UK that gave men a chance to use products made with healthy ingredients. In 2020, we grew the portfolio to add Jaxon Lane – a Korean skincare brand dedicated
to men, hugely popular with celebrities such as Nick Jonas among others. And finally, in 2021, we introduced The Groomed Co, one of Australia’s leading men’s skincare and grooming brands with a focus on botanicals and clean beauty for men.
What is the potential of the male grooming market in the region?
The global men’s grooming industry is expected to hit $78.6bn by 2023, whereas the global men’s skincare market is set to grow 24 per cent in the next five years to reach $5bn. When it comes to the MEA market, the men’s grooming market was worth $3.58bn in 2016 and is expected to touch $4.32bn by 2022. Research also suggests that the GCC men’s grooming market will dominate this growth and is expected to reach $3.27bn by 2022, accounting for more than 75 per cent of the wider region’s male grooming industry. This will be driven by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which hold a near 85 per cent market share between them.
What is your current scope of operations?
Over the past three years, the business has had a steady 15 per cent year-on-year growth from the time we started and with a slight increase in 2020, despite the pandemic. As of 2020, our current sales avenues encapsulate over 50 barbershops and men’s salons in the UAE, three luxury in-store retailers and three luxury online retailers. Our focus market has been the UAE, but we are looking at expansion within other GCC markets shortly.
Will The Grooming Lab evolve to include a standalone store too?
We haven’t ruled out the possibility of a standalone store. However, for now, the focus remains on the main business and growing our retail partnerships to both cover and break new ground.
Ben Kinerman-Daltrey Founder, KinFitz & Co What is the core business model of KinFitz & Co?
KinFitz & Co is a sales recruitment, training and coaching business, working specifically with startups and SMEs.
What were you doing before you started KinFitz & Co?
My co-founder and I were VPs at the seventh-highest funded startup in the Middle East, Bayzat, and helped grow its sales team from four to 150 people.
What gap did you see in the market that necessitated the need for such a company?
We worked with recruiters in the market when hiring for our previous company, and they never seemed to “get it” when we spoke about startup culture. We want to solve the problem of less funded startups who cannot afford to make mistakes when it comes to recruiting salespeople. Also, going through such hyper-growth in our sales organisation, we faced many challenges to scale training and coaching at the same speed our team was growing. We want to help other startups and SMEs overcome that challenge from all our learnings.
Does focusing on startups and SMEs make good longterm business sense?
For us, yes! We are keen to “stay in our lane”. We get startups, we understand what it takes to grow a startup, and we are well placed to advise and coach from our hands-on experience. We’ve witnessed the negative impact of unskilled sales professionals through our sales careers across Europe and the UAE, and the power of hiring good sales professionals, especially when every hire is a massive commercial decision.
What are some of the biggest challenges that you have encountered as an entrepreneur?
We began our startup journey on Day 3 of the nationwide lockdown. This was a huge decision for both Liam (co-founder) and I. We handed in our notice at our previous company at the start of January when Covid-19 wasn’t apparent in the region. We were both given the option to remain in employment, but we maintained the belief that we could solve the problems faced by many startups. In hindsight, starting up in a pandemic was the best decision that we made. We learned how to build a sustainable, revenue generating and scalable business.
What are your expansion plans?
We
doubled our team last year. We hired both a consultant and a marketing executive. We are aiming to have a team of eight by the end of June, with 10-12 team members by the end of the year. We have gained clients across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and the UK. We are also looking into expanding our operation more in Saudi Arabia, potentially developing business in Israel, and we hope to expand into some of the other startup hubs across Europe. We have taken on more technical and nonsales roles which is a huge area of growth for us and are hiring internally to bring expertise to this field as well. Our online sales coaching platform will also start helping sales individuals who are seeking support on their professional development.
Drew Joshua Dennehy
Co-founder and general manager, Three Coffee
What is your earliest memory of coffee?
Growing up in New Zealand, where coffee culture is big, we all get exposed to it at a very young age. While studying law and economics at university, I worked in cafes, and so have had a strong connection to hospitality, coffee and customer service. When I first moved to Dubai to work in a law firm, I very quickly found out that it wasn’t for me. I needed something more dynamic and people-oriented. Six months after I started my law journey, I was back into the coffee world and never looked back.
What is the USP of Three Coffee and what will it bring to the region?
We really believe in the idea behind specialty coffee; that we need to pay farmers more for the coffees we buy to keep the industry sustainable. But to pay farmers more we need to be able to charge more for the coffees we sell. To be able to do that we need to make sure we’re doing the best job that we can in roasting, brewing and most importantly recommending the right coffees to the right people. To do this we’ve come up with an online quiz that identifies customers’ ‘coffee personalities’, automatically recommending coffees that we believe suit those preferences.
THE UAE IS MUCH MORE PROGRESSIVE, WITH MANY ‘ACTIVE’ CONSUMERS LOOKING FOR COFFEE EXPERIENCES
What are some of the other areas where Three Coffee is working along the coffee value chain?
Being sustainable is really important for the entire coffee industry. We’re seeing new types of bacteria, fungi and pests affecting coffee farms and forcing them to change the way they farm their coffee. If we don’t help farmers manage this (by paying premiums), they will slowly convert their farms to growing other, more stable crops like fruit, vegetables and grain. Karthik, my business partner, has a lot of experience in making small changes to processing techniques that can help improve the quality of coffees our partner farms produce. This helps them make small, inexpensive changes that result in higher returns for the coffees they sell, not only to us, but other roasteries around the world.
What is the economic value of the coffee industry here in the UAE?
The UAE coffee market is valued at around $200m and it’s growing really fast. The UAE and other GCC markets are growing at a really high rate, somewhere around 7.5 per cent per year. The UAE is much more progressive, with many ‘active’ consumers looking for coffee experiences, where they’re tasting new and exciting flavours in their coffees. This experiential consumption is part of what I believe is driving the high compound annual growth rates here in the region.
Does the UAE have an established coffee culture?
The UAE has a strong connection to coffee history through the Dallah and Arabic style coffee which in some ways is driving global trends. There is no other market, apart from perhaps Japan and Korea, that has such a demand for fruity, and what could only be described as “funky” flavour profiles in their coffees. I’m excited for where the specialty coffee industry is going. The UAE and GCC won’t be adopting trends, but setting them.
What are some of your plans you have for the business going forward?
Saudi Arabia is a massively underserved market at the moment. There is so much demand for coffee and there will be a lot of growth from both the demand and supply side in Saudi. We’ll also be looking to open our new roastery-come-experience centre here in the UAE.
We want people to be able to walk in, touch and feel our brand and understand what specialty coffee is. Education will be centrestage, from the way the space is decorated to the coffee menu and the way we interact with our guests.