Ounass Brand Guidelines: Al Tayer’s 2016 Online Luxury Store & a Concrete Stage in Dubai

A December 2016 launch from a Dubai retail group.

Ounass is the online luxury store of Al Tayer Insignia, the retail business of the Dubai-based Al Tayer Group. English Wikipedia describes the group as a privately held holding company established in 1979, with interests that run from car dealerships and real estate to luxury and lifestyle retail. Its retail arm represents fashion, beauty, jewellery and home brands across the Gulf, and in 2010, English Wikipedia says, it signed the agreement with Macy’s that brought a Bloomingdale’s store to the Dubai Mall.

The online store went live on 15 December 2016, according to Al Tayer’s own launch announcement. FashionUnited, reporting on 19 December 2016, described it as the group’s debut online retail business: a bilingual Arabic and English site serving the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, selling women’s clothing, footwear, handbags, jewellery, cosmetics and home goods from designer labels. The names given at launch included Gucci and Roland Mouret alongside the regional designers Rami Al Ali and Ayesha Depala, and the company said several labels would make capsule collections for the site.

Service was part of the pitch from the start. FashionUnited listed free delivery, cash on delivery, an in-home personal styling service and easy exchanges and returns, with orders reaching Dubai addresses in under two hours, the rest of the UAE on the same day and other Gulf states within 48 hours. Khalid Al Tayer, then chief executive of Al Tayer Insignia, said the site would offer merchandise and “content shot locally and created specifically for her lifestyle”; the launch range was womenswear. The company’s announcement added that an in-house team of editorial content creators would produce that material.

From 65 labels to more than 1,200.

By its fifth anniversary the store had grown well beyond its launch range. Writing in Vogue Business in March 2022, Sujata Assomull reported that Ounass had started with 65 brands and then carried more than 1,200, from international houses such as Balenciaga, Gucci and Fendi to regional labels including Dima Ayad and the Beirut designer Sandra Mansour. The Dubai jewellery brand Bil Arabi, the magazine said, had been on the site since launch. Khalid Al Tayer, by then chief executive of Ounass and managing director of Al Tayer Insignia, told the magazine that in 2016 the group believed it had reached “the right inflection point” to take its offline business into online luxury.

Vogue Business described several parts of the model. Ounass mixed wholesale buying with a marketplace in which brands sell through the site, and it worked with labels on capsules and limited editions; the London shoe brand Malone Soulier, for example, made an exclusive with it each season. Al Tayer told the magazine that ready-to-wear was the store’s biggest category and that jewellery and watches were growing fastest. Ounass added a vintage category in 2021, and by early 2022 it had begun a three-hour delivery service in Riyadh alongside two-hour delivery in Dubai. Sandra Mansour told the magazine that the speed of delivery had helped win over shoppers in the region. The group’s other businesses gave the store a footing: Al Tayer Insignia holds the licences for Harvey Nichols in the UAE and for Bloomingdale’s in the UAE and Kuwait, Vogue Business noted.

Not every digital venture lasted. The same article recorded that Nisnass, a mobile-first Al Tayer platform aimed at younger shoppers with lower price points, closed in 2020 after two years of operation. Ounass carried on, and as of May 2026 it served the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman, according to the Dubai trade title Communicate, citing the company’s website.

Malls, apps and the Gulf shopper.

Gulf fashion, home and online retailers present themselves first through the places where people shop. In the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and their neighbours, many chains trade from large mall units, and the store fascia, a name in lit letters above a wide entrance, is often the first piece of branding a shopper sees. Groups that run several chains often place them side by side in the same mall, or gather them under one umbrella name, so that a single visit can cover clothing, shoes, children’s goods and homeware.

Value-fashion and home chains speak through campaigns timed to the retail calendar: seasonal collections, catalogues and named sale events. Their identity work tends to show up in store refits as much as in advertising. A new logo usually arrives with a redesigned flagship, new signage and new in-store graphics, and then spreads to the rest of the estate store by store, sometimes over months or years.

Online retailers carry the same task onto app screens, product pages and delivery packaging. There the brand becomes a set of repeated elements: a wordmark, a colour, a tone of voice in notifications, and the boxes and bags that arrive at the door. Store groups in the region also run their own apps and click-and-collect services, so the line between the shop and the screen is less sharp than it once was.

Store names are usually plain and descriptive, and the companies publish them in English as they appear above the door. Corporate pages and dated press coverage give the facts behind those names: who founded each business and when, which family or group owns it, and whether its shares are listed on an exchange such as Tadawul, ADX or DFM. These guides draw on those dated sources and describe colour and type only as our own interpretation, with no logo or fascia reproduced.

A concrete building in Jumeirah.

For most of its life Ounass had no shop of its own; it met customers through pop-ups and events. In 2026 it opened Ounass Stage, a physical space in Dubai where brands take over the room for a set period. Communicate reported on 28 May 2026 that the first tenant was the New York label Aimé Leon Dore, with a six-month activation that, according to Hypebeast as cited by the trade title, combined a shop, a Café Leon Dore, a Porsche 911SC on display and artwork by Tyrrell Winston. Ounass did not disclose the commercial terms, Communicate added, and the concept gave its online model a physical room for launches and installations.

The building carries the design idea. Retail Design Blog, writing on 9 June 2026, said Ounass Stage occupies a newly built concrete structure in the residential district of Jumeirah, with interiors by the Berlin practice VAUST Studio. The designers worked from an idea they called “Alternate Abundance” and drew on brutalism and modernism, using concrete, galvanised steel and glass blocks. Two staircases sit inside protruding glass-block volumes, and recessed pits filled with desert sand from neighbouring Sharjah lie under walkable glass. A long back wall clad in metal and concrete gathers the kitchen, stock room, changing rooms, staff space and a meeting room into one volume, and a lift links the floor to the basement car park, so the space can work as shop, gallery and event room at once, the blog said.

For a design guide, Ounass shows how a store that began on a screen gave its edit a physical room built from concrete, steel, glass block and sand. Compare Namshi, another Dubai online fashion store, and Noon, the Gulf online marketplace. For this guide we use ink black, desert sand and concrete grey with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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