Nooruldeen Agha, founder and CEO, Elabelz
Beware of the underdog This e-commerce startup’s track record and growth rate so far makes it one to watch By Tamara Pupic “We are working on finalizing our first major round of funding from venture capitalists. We are talking with multiple regional investors with a plan to close the round within the next six to eight weeks.”
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Entrepreneur september 2017
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n October last year, reports came out about a Dubaibased fashion e-commerce venture entering the very nascent Iraqi e-commerce market, having developed a customized solution of delivery and payment for the country’s large, increasingly tech savvy and often deeppocketed youth population. The online fashion e-commerce platform, described by its founder as “officially the world’s first international e-commerce company that directly caters to the Iraqi market,” had already been operational in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Qatar, in addition to the UAE. Surprisingly, this news bit wasn’t about some of the region’s leading e-commerce players, who have (arguably) a
stronger brand power and substantial resources at their fingertips, but about Elabelz, an online fashion retailer that had, at the time, been established only four months earlier. Since its launch in May 2016, Elabelz’s website and Android and iOS apps have offered over 21,000 fashion products for men, women and children from high profile local and international brands, adding 250 new products every day. Their target audience are young consumers, aged 30 and below. The company has been enjoying a steady 40% growth month on month, beating even its most ambitious expectations and plans. “So far, we have been low key, gathering strength, experience and brain power while
enjoying being the underdog,” says Nooruldeen Agha, founder and CEO of Elabelz. “We needed to build our operations by integrating the best practices from the region and beyond, and we wanted to ensure that we could offer to our pool of customers a service they had always dreamt of having in the region.” As of now though, given all that the Elabelz team have accomplished so far, the startup is now all set on growing its operations. “With a proven track record and amazing growth rate over the past 10 months, we are now ready to scale our operations in multiples of 10 in a very short period of time, putting what we have built to work, and starting to gain a sizeable market share,” Agha reveals. “We are working on finalizing our first major round of funding from venture capitalists. We are talking with multiple regional investors with a plan to close the round within the next six to eight weeks.” A graduate of the American University of Sharjah, Agha started his career as a software engineer in 2010, climbing up the ranks in the region’s oil and gas companies. However, it was in 2013 that he decided to carve out his own path by co-founding Elephant Nation, a branding and digital advertising agency, with his wife Rand Al Maeeni. Having gathered a team of “creative tech savvy enthusiasts from around the world who are hungry for innovation, new design experiences and intelligence,” the wifeand-husband entrepreneurial duo left their mark on the region’s branding and digital advertising sector, having worked with more than 100 clients, including the Government of Dubai, Emaar Properties, and DP World, to name but a few.