Aretha Natural Beauty

Client Overview

Aretha Natural Beauty is a UAE based beauty retailer founded in 2017, built around a simple idea: helping people feel their best through high quality, professional grade hair and body care. Rather than selling a single line, Aretha operates as a multi brand house and is the official UAE partner for four distinct professional brands, milk_shake, DEPOT, ROUTINE, and SIMPLY ZEN. Each brand speaks to a different need and a different audience, from color and repair systems for the hair, to a complete grooming range for men, to scalp wellbeing and natural cream deodorants.

The business serves two types of customer at once. On the retail side, it sells directly to consumers across the Emirates, with same day delivery and a catalog organized around real concerns such as damaged, dry, frizzy, and color treated hair. On the professional side, it supplies salons and stylists who rely on these brands in their day to day work. Supporting both audiences from one storefront, while giving each of the four brands room to express its own identity, is the challenge that shaped everything we did together.

The Challenge

Our relationship with Aretha did not begin with a redesign. It began with us taking over the day to day management of their existing Shopify store. That starting point mattered, because it meant the redesign was never a guess. By running the store first, we came to understand the catalog, the customers, the seasonal rhythm of the business, and exactly where the previous setup was holding growth back.

Several issues became clear over those first months of management. The store carried four very different brands, but the experience treated them as one undifferentiated catalog, so the heritage and positioning of each brand was lost on the customer. Product discovery was difficult for shoppers who think in terms of a problem to solve rather than a brand name. The marketing engine was underused, with no structured email automation capturing the value of an already loyal customer base. The checkout experience left conversion on the table. And the professional, salon facing side of the business had no proper home on the website at all.

The brief that emerged was twofold: first, grow the existing store through better marketing, merchandising, and conversion work, and second, rebuild the storefront into a premium, multi brand experience that could carry that growth forward.

Our Approach

Because we were already managing the store, our approach was grounded in evidence rather than assumption. Every recommendation we made was tied back to what we were seeing in the data and in customer behavior, and we reviewed performance with the client on a regular cadence so the roadmap stayed honest and focused on what actually moved the business.

We sequenced the work deliberately. The first phase concentrated on growth within the existing store, the changes that could deliver value quickly without waiting for a full rebuild. The second phase was the redesign and re platforming onto a new premium theme, informed by everything the first phase had taught us. This staging meant the client saw momentum early, and the eventual redesign was a refinement of proven ideas rather than a leap into the unknown.

When it came time to redesign, we started with research. We reviewed the brand architecture, the way customers were searching and filtering, the role of bundles and systems in the catalog, and the requirements of the professional audience. That research defined the structure of the new site before a single screen was designed.

Design and User Experience

The entire website was redesigned in Figma across both desktop and mobile, covering the core pages of the experience including the home page, About Us, Contact, and a dedicated B2B page. The guiding principle was a single premium identity for Aretha, with four clearly distinct brand worlds living inside it.

To achieve that, we designed brand specific templates rather than forcing every product into one generic layout. Each of the four brands received its own collection page template and its own product page template, each reflecting that brand's visual identity, tone, and accent colors while remaining unmistakably part of the Aretha ecosystem. We then integrated each brand's story and positioning directly into the customer journey, so a shopper landing on a brand does not just see products, they understand the philosophy and the value behind the range.

We also rebuilt discovery around how customers actually shop. Alongside browsing by brand, the new experience lets people shop by concern and by hair type, guiding someone with a specific problem straight to the products designed to solve it. The navigation and footer were restructured into a clear, intentional hierarchy that ties the four brands, the concern based collections, and the bundles together without overwhelming the shopper.

Shopify Development and Migration

Following theme research, we moved Aretha onto a carefully selected premium Shopify theme chosen for its support of a multi brand structure, its scalability, its language flexibility, and its proven track record on other live stores. We deliberately avoided unproven or thinly supported themes, since the new foundation needed to carry the business for years.

We then developed the full storefront on this new theme, implementing the brand specific collection and product templates, the home, About, Contact, and B2B pages, and the restructured navigation. Collections were configured as automated smart collections driven by tags, so the catalog largely organizes itself as products are added, including the concern based and hair type based collections that power discovery. We extended the brand experience through to the edges of the journey by applying Aretha branding to the checkout and to transactional emails, and we built out the store policies so the experience felt complete and trustworthy.

Quality assurance was handled through a structured review process that let the client annotate the site visually during user acceptance testing and again after launch. This kept feedback precise and traceable, and it meant issues were resolved methodically rather than through scattered messages.

Integrations and Automation

A significant part of the value we delivered came from the operational and marketing infrastructure built around the store during the management phase and carried into the new site.

On payments, we migrated the store from its previous gateway onto Stripe, giving customers a smoother and more familiar checkout with support for Apple Pay, Google Pay, and major cards. On marketing, we implemented Klaviyo and set up the core email automation flows the store had been missing, including welcome, thank you, abandoned cart, and winback, alongside a programme of monthly campaigns. These flows turned an already loyal customer base into a recurring, measurable revenue channel that works quietly in the background.

We also introduced agentic AI to the storefront, providing an intelligent search and shopping assistant that understands natural language and buyer intent rather than relying on exact keywords. We trained it on the specifics of Aretha's ranges so its recommendations reflect how the products are actually meant to be used, which is critical when guiding a customer with damaged or color treated hair to the right system.

Custom Functionality

Two pieces of functionality were built specifically around how Aretha's business works.

The first is the B2B page, a dedicated home for the professional side of the business. It showcases the salons and professional clients Aretha already works with and includes an application form so new salons and partners can apply to work with the brand, turning a previously invisible part of the business into a proper acquisition channel.

The second is a Subscribe and Save model for the catalog's replenishable products. Hair and body care such as shampoo, conditioner, and deodorant are bought on a predictable cycle, so we implemented a subscription option that lets customers save on recurring deliveries timed to their own routine. Built on a subscription solution chosen for its strong UAE support, including local billing in AED, it creates predictable recurring revenue and lifts customer lifetime value, and we supported its launch with a targeted campaign to existing repeat customers.