Eyewa Brand Guidelines: The Gulf Eyewear Start-Up That Went From Website to Shops

Two former consultants and an online shop.

Eyewa began as a website. The National, the Abu Dhabi newspaper, reported in July 2021 that the company was launched in October 2017 by Mehdi Oudghiri and Anass Boumediene, two Moroccans who had met as consultants at Bain & Company in Dubai. From 2015 the pair had run the Middle East and North Africa operations of foodpanda, the food-delivery business that Delivery Hero bought in 2016, and after that sale they agreed a transition plan with Delivery Hero and set out to build a company of their own, the newspaper said. Both wear glasses, and the eyewear trade looked to them like a gap in the regional market.

The start was small. According to The National, the founders first put in their own savings and raised seed funding within a few months of launch; the Dubai start-up site MENAbytes reported the seed round in January 2018, describing Eyewa as a Dubai-based online shop selling glasses, sunglasses and contact lenses in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The National stressed that Eyewa was not a marketplace for other retailers but an online shop buying its own stock. At that stage it sold other companies’ brands — MENAbytes named Ray-Ban, Persol, Prada and Burberry among them — rather than frames of its own.

Saudi Arabia came quickly. The National reported that Eyewa entered the kingdom within weeks of its UAE launch and that, by 2021, it was the company’s biggest market, served by three fulfilment centres for its three main regions, while a Dubai centre handled orders from the other Gulf markets. When TechCrunch covered the company in November 2024 it named a third co-founder, Abdullah AlRugaib, also a former Bain consultant.

Own labels, then a gallery-like shop.

The move to its own products came after a period of selling other brands. TechCrunch reported that Eyewa sold third-party eyewear online for about two years and used what it learned about customer searches and purchases to design in-house ranges; by November 2024 it had nine of its own brands, the company told the site. The National named three of them in 2021 — 30Sundays, Blackout and Layala — and said Eyewa sourced frames from partners in China, Italy, the United States and South Korea, with its contact lenses made in the United States. All three names still appeared on the company’s UAE website in November 2026, where one label is styled BlackOut and Layala is used for coloured contact lenses.

Shops followed. Eyewa began opening stores in December 2020, TechCrunch reported, and Gulf News dated its first Saudi store to that month. The flagship in the Mall of Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia, was written up by the design magazine Dezeen in March 2021. It was a 100-square-metre shop designed by Pierre Brocas and Nada Oudghiri, who said they wanted to move away from the clinical look of most eyewear stores.

Dezeen described a grey shell with terrazzo floors and undulating clay walls, wall units of powder-coated plywood in Eyewa’s bright colours, and plinths of plywood and clear acrylic that could be stacked and rearranged. Brocas cited the Memphis movement and Ettore Sottsass as references, alongside the minimal art of Donald Judd. A ceiling of 39 hanging panels, coral on one side and turquoise on the other, hid pipes and lighting, and a row of convex mirrors at the counter echoed the shape of lenses.

The shift in tone was deliberate. In 2021 Oudghiri told The National that Eyewa’s shops would have a different “look and feel” from what was then on the market, and in 2024 he told TechCrunch that the company sells glasses, prescription frames included, as fashion accessories: “fashion is the thing that customers really care about,” he said.

The UAE followed in August 2021, when Gulf News reported the opening of Eyewa’s first shop in the country, at City Centre Mirdif in Dubai; at that point the company had four stores in Saudi Arabia.

Optical retail and its record.

Optical retail chains present themselves above all through the shop sign. The name over the door has to work at street level, on a shopping-centre fascia and on a phone screen, and many chains in this group run more than one name at once. In the Nordic countries, Synsam trades as Synsam in Sweden, Norway and Finland but as Profil Optik in Denmark and Iceland, while Finland’s Instru Optiikka runs Instrumentarium, Nissen and Keops side by side.

Ownership is part of the story these companies tell, and it varies widely. Some chains began as alliances of independent opticians or as co-operatives and buying groups; others grew from a single founder or a family business; still others now sit inside listed groups or private-equity portfolios. Corporate pages on founders, owners and dates are often the most useful material for a designer, because they explain why one network carries several names or why a sign has outlived the company that created it.

Own-label frames are the second constant. Chains in Japan, Brazil, Spain, France, the Nordic countries and the Gulf sell frames under their own range names next to outside brands, and those names are given here as the companies publish them, collection by collection. Store formats follow the same pattern: flagship shops, outlet or second-hand formats, franchise stores and online sales are each described in the companies’ own terms.

The guides in this group set out each chain’s published history, ownership and store network with dates, and then offer an unofficial palette and a type stand-in for reference. They make no claims about eye care, lenses or examinations, and no logo or shop sign is reproduced.

A name written in lower case.

Eyewa has been funded by venture investors rather than a corporate parent. The National reported a Series A round in the first quarter of 2019 led by Wamda Capital, and a larger round in June 2021; TechCrunch named Nuwa Capital and Endeavor Catalyst among the 2021 investors. In November 2024 Eyewa announced a Series C round led by the growth investor General Atlantic, with Badwa Capital and Turmeric Capital, Gulf News and MENAbytes reported. Gulf News described the company as having dual headquarters in Riyadh and Dubai.

As of November 2024, Eyewa had more than 150 stores across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, according to Gulf News; TechCrunch reported that all of them were owned and operated by the company, with no franchises, and that it employed about 1,300 people, figures the company gave. The company writes its name in lower case, as “eyewa,” on its website and in its own announcements.

For a design guide, Eyewa shows how an online-first retailer can carry a bright, playful colour language from the screen into a physical shop. Compare Mister Spex, the German online optician that Oudghiri cited as an example in 2018, and Warby Parker, another eyewear retailer that began online and later opened shops. For this guide we use coral, turquoise and a deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Eyewa’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.