Abu Dhabi, UAE,  April 12, 2018.  Heba Al Fazari, founder of the fashion startup Coveti.com.. 
Victor Besa / The National
National
Reporter:  Ann Marie McQueen
Abu Dhabi, UAE, April 12, 2018. Heba Al Fazari, founder of the fashion startup Coveti.com.. Victor Besa / The National National Reporter: Ann Marie McQueen

Start-up Coveti.com brings niche fashion to the UAE



Heba Al Fazari had already been a civil engineer, a diplomat and an image consultant when she decided on her current business path 18 months ago.

The uber-stylish 37-year-old Emirati points to the jumper-style black dress she is wearing, bought from a Japanese designer called Limi feu, which she found in the corner of a Tokyo department store. The item not only still gets a lot of compliments – but represents a turning point.

“Every time I’m asked ‘where did you get this’, I say ‘it’s from Japan but I don’t even know how to buy it anymore’,” she says.

The brand wasn’t online, and the department store’s website was entirely in Japanese with no translation.

“I wanted to go back to the website and buy something but I couldn’t find them,” she says. “Maybe it was there, but I will never know.”

That was the beginning of her fashion start-up Coveti.com, which launched in March. But this is no Net-a-porter wannabe. Instead the 12 brands currently on offer – 10 more are in the immediate pipeline – have a specific set of criteria: they must be directional, emerging designers, new-to-the-UAE, and have been carefully curated from Ms Al Fazari’s own extensive travels.

So far there are men’s and women’s shoes, jewellery and accessories, with plans to add clothing soon. As for the business model, when customers buy a bag from Spain and one from Paris through Coveti.com, they will be charged one flat fee and have them shipped straight from the stores.

Ms Al Fazari’s penchant for clothes that are original, with flair, that might be purchased in small boutiques on trendy streets in London or Toronto – but never on the high street – spurred her own frustration at the lack of that preferred apparel niche locally.

“Things are not available in the UAE,” she explains. “I cannot get whatever I want at a good price. Either I buy Dior and Chanel, which is not in my disposable income for everyday wear, or I just buy Mango and Zara and it’s really, really boring.”

Ms Al Fazari first ventured into online fashion after a trip to Bangalore in 2013 while earning her MBA at Georgetown University in Washington. After leaving her suitcase behind, she realised she needed garments and was appalled at the poor quality and terrible design on offer. The website she subsequently launched in India has since been closed, due to a change in business laws, but it served as a precursor for Coveti.com.

The idea was, Ms Al Fazari says: “If I need it, I’m sure other people will need it too.”

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The entrepreneur has big plans for Coveti.com to be much more than an online boutique for her international fashion finds. Soon she will showcase emerging local designers, from the UAE and Mena region.

Within two months she aims to launch another section of the website where customers can fully customise their orders, starting with men’s shoes and expanding to other items. Her plans are to offer this service to help smaller designers produce their work for sale to the public, as well.

Currently Ms Al Fazari charges designers 20 to 45 per cent on international orders, a sliding scale depending on whether they take advantage of her marketing and social media services.

Then there is the “Get Inspired” social commerce section of the site, which uses technology that grabs all social media related to the brands Coveti.com sells. That means instead of a traditional gallery, the website can, with permission, feature an assortment of images including Solange Knowles in action wearing its Carla Lopez circular Jirafa pouch – with a link right back to the section where customers can buy it.

“It’s basically user-generated content,” says Ms Al Fazari. “We go and collect all this data around the globe and we showcase it in the right touchpoint at the right moment so you will buy.”

It’s not easy launching a fashion start-up in the UAE, Ms Al Fazari says. The bureacracy can be daunting and inflexible – some licenses require vast amounts of storage, for example, which a website like Coveti.com does not need. And costs can be prohibitive, particularly for technology, which she outsources to India.

There two developers and a designer who help mould and shape Coveti.com into what Ms Al Fazari hopes will be the best, fastest customer experience possible. The staff costs are about US$1,700 (Dh6,243) per month, compared with the Dh30,000 she would be likely to have to pay in the UAE.

Ms Al Fazari feels the key to her company’s success will be in having a business model that moves like “water in a pipe – one way”.

“With other traditional, wholesale retailers, they have the working-capital risk, they have the rental risk, they have the warehousing risk and on top of that the inventory risk,” she says.

“We don’t have any of that stuff. We have a digital platform to connect A to B.”

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Joker: Folie a Deux

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson

Director: Todd Phillips 

Rating: 2/5

The Specs

Price, base Dh379,000
Engine 2.9-litre, twin-turbo V6
Gearbox eight-speed automatic
Power 503bhp
Torque 443Nm
On sale now

Jigra
Director: Vasan Bala
Starring: Alia Bhatt, Vedang Raina, Manoj Pahwa, Harsh Singh
Rated: 3.5/5
What is graphene?

Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.

It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.

Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.

By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.

At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.

It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.

But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.

In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties. 

 

The specs
Engine: 3.0-litre 6-cyl turbo

Power: 374hp at 5,500-6,500rpm

Torque: 500Nm from 1,900-5,000rpm

Transmission: 8-speed auto

Fuel consumption: 8.5L/100km

Price: from Dh285,000

On sale: from January 2022 

COMPANY PROFILE
Name: ARDH Collective
Based: Dubai
Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
Sector: Sustainability
Total funding: Self funded
Number of employees: 4
The National Archives, Abu Dhabi

Founded over 50 years ago, the National Archives collects valuable historical material relating to the UAE, and is the oldest and richest archive relating to the Arabian Gulf.

Much of the material can be viewed on line at the Arabian Gulf Digital Archive - https://www.agda.ae/en

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The chef's advice

Troy Payne, head chef at Abu Dhabi’s newest healthy eatery Sanderson’s in Al Seef Resort & Spa, says singles need to change their mindset about how they approach the supermarket.

“They feel like they can’t buy one cucumber,” he says. “But I can walk into a shop – I feed two people at home – and I’ll walk into a shop and I buy one cucumber, I’ll buy one onion.”

Mr Payne asks for the sticker to be placed directly on each item, rather than face the temptation of filling one of the two-kilogram capacity plastic bags on offer.

The chef also advises singletons not get too hung up on “organic”, particularly high-priced varieties that have been flown in from far-flung locales. Local produce is often grown sustainably, and far cheaper, he says.

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