As part of my day-to-day business, I get the opportunity to chat up with various entrepreneurs in the region. A recent Zoom session with Sara was a novel experience.
Sara is from Morocco and like most Dubai-based expats came here for a few years – and just stayed on. I guess this is what Dubai does to people. While she was well ensconced in an attractive role as a Senior Manager, Strategy and Investment with MBC Group, she decided to turn entrepreneur.
Citron.ae was conceived in 2017when Sara was looking around to buy lunch boxes for her son that were stylish, leak-proof, and eco-friendly. It was around those days when all her son wanted was to chew on lemons! So you see the connection.
Every business that is born to fulfil a need normally succeeds.As they say, in business one thing leads to another. And so it happened with Sara as well. While she was scouting around to source her products, along came her husband’s friend who had experience in sourcing products from China. He was instrumental in connecting her with suppliers from China.
Lo and behold, when the first consignment of 3,000 lunch boxes arrived in Dubai, Sara was in a quandary. Now she had the ominous task of making sure she could sell this huge quantity. And so she went about it meticulously and did quite successfully, in a matter of few weeks.
This whole experience was a stepping stone to success. Now she knew there was an appetite in the market for these products and so she steamrolled ahead with her plans of adding more products and expanding her distribution network to include brick and mortar stores and online e-tailers.
Fast forward to today. Sara has successfully raised a 7 figures Pre-Series A Funding from Arzan VC, has over 90 SKU’s in her portfolio,sold more than 100,000 products in a couple of years, and has expanded her geographic reach to several GCC countries.
It does not stop there for Sara. She is supremely confident of taking her brand to a larger global audience within the next few years. With stars in her eyes and her head on her shoulders, it is a matter of time before her dreams become a reality.
Notes from Sharad Agarwal