Rema Nelson wanted to be a journalist. It’s probably the first thing she shares with me as we sit down for a chat over a hot cup of tea. I tell her that bit of information is music to my ears, and we both laugh—because the woman who now oversees Maje, Sandro, KIABI, Ted Baker, and Aape across the Middle East for Al-Futtaim was, at eighteen, filling in forms for a degree she never ended up taking. But she clearly still learned how to tell a story, just from a different perspective.

What derailed her career as a journalist before it even began was a Saturday job working at the fashion label Karen Millen in the UK and a manager at the time who floated a tempting offer. “Rema, we have a summer vacancy. We have a supervisor role. Can you take it for the summer if you want extra cash?” Nelson says about the fateful encounter, and then shrugs at the memory. “I thought to myself okay, why not?” Then the summer happened and undid all her journalistic plans. “I just loved it. I loved how the team relied on me,” she recalls, grinning from ear to ear. “I felt like, oh, okay, I get to tell everyone what to do and they must listen to me, even at such a young age.” She went home and told her family of her brand-new career path. “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to do this permanently now.” She still sounds amazed that she had to make such a dramatic life choice shift. “It was just like a 180.”

What follows sounds like something of a whirlwind, with Nelson moving up through the ranks at Millen, first in the UK and across Europe then with a stint in America, working as the brand’s Retail Operations Manager out of Los Angeles. Then her brother, already based in Dubai, told her she needed to visit, and quietly sent her CV to Chalhoub Group. That was 16 years ago: 10 with Chalhoub, where she built the multi-brand and luxury fashion division; then Saint Laurent; and now she has banked two and a half years at Al-Futtaim.

One thing has stayed constant across every role and become a guiding principle for Nelson: her commitment to the shop floor. “I’ve never left the shop floor. I’ve always stayed connected to our customers on the shop floor,” she affirms. And this is no figure of speech, she means it literally and confesses that in a recent assessment from Al-Futtaim, they noted that she wasn’t often in the office. It’s a bit of feedback she takes as a compliment, and an indication that she is doing her job right. “No, I’m not going to be in the office. I’m with my team,” she says with a twinkle in her eye.

This “boots on the ground” habit came from an early manager, an Italian woman named Serena. Nelson describes her as both fantastic and fierce. But also, someone who asked for Nelson’s opinion and then listened to it. “That impression always stayed with me because I felt like, oh, she really wanted to hear our voices.” Today Nelson has followed in her meteor’s footsteps and asks her own teams the same unglamorous questions — who are your customers, is the collection connecting with people, what are the gaps. “Communicating back even if we don’t get the win, is always good – to kind of keep them in the know. At the end of the day, they’re the first one interfacing with our clients,” says Nelson.

When she first arrived in Dubai Nelson admits that it “humbled me a bit”. But she sees this as a compliment to the market rather than a complaint. Over the years she has seen many others make the same wrong assumptions she once did. They come to the region from Europe or Asia with the preconceived notion that what worked in their market would also resonate with the MENA consumer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Sixteen years on, the biggest shift she has witnessed is a reversal of who talks and who listens in the premium and luxury retail space. “When I first came here, I thought we knew — and we’re going to tell the Middle Eastern customers what they wanted. Now, we’re actually telling the West what’s working, this is what we want and need, and they are finally listening.” Her evidence is commercial rather than sentimental: “the brands who are winning are the ones who are listening to the customers in the region.”

When I ask for proof of this change in perception she offers quite a striking anecdotal example. Currently the best-selling item at Sandro regionally is a mini skirt. “We have these private events where it’s all women, and they feel very comfortable in clothing that might be surprising to some.” This story perfectly illustrates the often-lazy assumption the rest of the world has about what women here buy. But truly knowing a customer base can only happen when you have somebody on the shop floor to notice.

This naturally brings us to the topic of the current sluggish state of the luxury market. Luxury, Nelson argues, has priced itself out of its own aspirational customer. “Everyone wants to have the Gucci, the Louis Vuitton, the Chanel, but the price points just keep increasing without a clear increase in quality or value.” Her verdict is blunt: customers have lost confidence in the brands they once coveted. But they haven’t stopped shopping, they have just focused that retail therapy energy elsewhere. “That aspirational client is moving now to premium, and this is where premium has a big opportunity.” Nelson’s strategy for Al-Futtaim brands is to deliver “the luxury service at a premium price point.” And the stakes, in her telling, couldn’t be higher. “Whoever wins at this, it’s going to win big,” she affirms.

Sandro is where she is proving this shift. The problem, as she diagnosed it, was a service gap her own customers were crossing daily. “I go into a Saint Laurent store and I’m in this grand environment, and the service is exceptional. Then I come into a Sandro and I’m expected to help myself,” she explains. So Nelson decided it was time to make some noise for Sandro that felt in keeping with what clientele usually come to expect from luxury brands. She put together a dinner in partnership with a luxury fashion magazine at a private Abu Dhabi museum that had never hosted such an event before. And, for the first time in the brand’s history here, VIP clients were flown in from Saudi, Qatar and Kuwait for the event. There was even a pianist brought over from Paris especially for the occasion.

It worked. “The brand is flying,” Nelson says, noting that return visits of customers are now more frequent and average basket spends are up. “We’re the top two across the world,” she adds regarding how her brands perform compared to other markets. “Sandro is number one, and Maje is number two.”

“You’re moving a mindset that is very transactional and operational to a mindset that is very relationship building,” she explains about the shift she is trying to make for her brands. She wants sales associates who will say “love your shoes” to a customer when they walk into one of her stores. But she admits this was hard even in luxury, where “the product almost sold itself.” So she runs frontliner coffee mornings with her sales staff and actions what comes out of them. For example, a highly successful clienteling app is now being used so associates hold their own client relationships rather than firing generic CRM messages into the void, and she is also pushing toward two days off for those who are still working six-day weeks.

Nelson’s current inclusive and expansive leadership philosophy was arrived at the hard way. She began as a human-centred leader, “where the business suffered because I was too empathetic,” she recalls. Then she overcorrected into something “very assertive, or maybe very aggressive, where it’s like, no, business comes first.” Neither method worked in the extreme, but one thing that Nelson is very clear on is that success in retail comes down to making those first organic connections with customers as they walk in the door. “People are the ones who bring the performance, and that balance is really hard to find,” she says.

When I ask her about a teachable moment when she learned from failure Nelson throws her head back. “Oh my God, so many!” The one she picks involves arriving at a brand, whose name she will not share, convinced she already had all the answers. “I did absolutely everything on my own because I felt that was what was needed.” In the end, no surprise here, she didn’t have all the answers and could have benefited immensely from asking for help, and perhaps a bit of guidance. The lesson she learned from that experience has become her advice to anyone coming up behind her. “It’s ok to fail and learn from your failures, as long as it’s not repeated.” And treat vulnerability as an asset: “People see that as a weakness, but I generally see that as a strength,” she says. Especially with the ones who are not the loudest in the room. “If you listen to connect with people, everything else follows.”

Then there is Nelson’s other passion that comes to light when I ask what she likes to do when she wants to switch off. Unsurprisingly, instead of listing off a bunch of fun extracurricular activities she admits that she is spending all of her free time at Your Vibe. And what is Your Vibe, you might ask? It’s the salon she opened two years ago in Dubai Marina; and she is currently in negotiations for a second location. “Ever since I was little, I always wanted a salon, and I think this is the Lebanese in me,” she says. Beaming as she shares how her mother would take the children for blow-dries when she was a kid. “That feeling just lasted with me and I finally decided it’s now or never.”

For Nelson, besides it being a lifelong dream to own and run a salon, her decision to launch the company also comes from a desire to give back, in some small way, to a country and a city that has done so much for her over the years. “You know what people used to think about America years ago? That anything was possible there. I feel this is what we have here. The UAE gives you that opportunity.”

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