Sun & Sand Sports Brand Guidelines: A 1979 Jumeirah Shop, Nike and a Dubai Sports Chain

A banker, a pair of shoes and a name taken from the landscape.

Sun & Sand Sports, which shortens its name to SSS, is a multi-brand sports retailer from Dubai. Its parent, GMG (Gulf Marketing Group), dates the first Sun and Sand Sports store to 1979 in its company timeline, and Inside Retail reported in June 2023 that GMG’s chief executive gave the same founding year. The group itself is a little older: GMG’s timeline starts in 1977 with a small butchery opened by its founder, Abdul Aziz Baker, while Gulf News reported in February 2021 that the group was set up in 1978.

The founder’s story has been told several times by his son, Mohammad A. Baker, now GMG’s deputy chairman and chief executive. In a December 2013 interview with Sport360, he said his father was working at the National Bank of Dubai in the late 1970s when, on a visit to the United States, he came across a pair of Nike shoes, took up a distributorship for the Middle East and, back in Dubai, began selling from a small shop in Jumeirah. He added that his father had been as taken with the simplicity of the swoosh logo as with the shoes themselves.

Gulf News, in 2021, quoted him saying that his father “kept writing in to Nike” until the brand gave him the opportunity, and that the earlier butchery had served expatriates settling in Jumeirah, flying in meat and selling it as refined cuts. When the sports business launched in the late 1970s, he told the paper, the only sport getting much attention in the region was football.

GMG tells a second origin story too. Its timeline says the sports business began with “a flying shoe”: watching a football match, the founder saw a shoe fly off during a free kick and decided to bring international sports brands to Dubai. Images RetailME, in an April 2022 cover story, placed that match on open ground outside his single shop in Jumeirah. GMG dates its appointment as Nike’s official distributor in the GCC to 1982.

The name is local. “Our name itself comes from this country – there’s the sun and the sand,” Mohammad A. Baker told Gulf News in 2021, calling Sun & Sand Sports a UAE brand.

From one shop to the six Gulf states.

The chain grew across the Gulf. By December 2013, Sport360 reported, the business that started as one shop selling Nike shoes had become 106 Sun and Sand Sports shops across the six GCC countries, and Mohammad A. Baker said the chain carried about 80 brands. At that point he was the group’s vice-chairman and had worked in the stores since childhood, starting in the storeroom of the Jumeirah shop.

Store formats changed with the market. Mohammad A. Baker told Images RetailME in April 2022 that the group reviewed its store concept in 2015, worked with several agencies to map the customer’s journey through the store and launched a “2.0” format, and that it rethinks store strategy about every five years; the month before the interview, by his account, it opened a “3.0” multi-brand store at The Dubai Mall, where a basketball court in one corner is changed regularly. He also said GMG began digitising in 2014 and merged its store and online divisions in 2017.

Alongside the multi-brand chain, GMG runs single-brand and specialist formats. Its timeline lists a Jordan store at The Dubai Mall and a Converse store in 2016, the Basketbolista basketball store the same year, the Nu Athlete concept for young athletes in 2017 and the Dropkick sneaker store in 2019. It also records buying Nike stores from Sports Zone and Al Hokair in 2012 and 11 stores from Retail Corp in 2017.

As of November 2026, GMG’s website describes SSS as a home-grown multi-sports concept, sitting beside the international brands the group distributes and the first Sports Direct store in Dubai, opened with Frasers Group in 2025.

Signs, stores and owners.

Sporting-goods chains across the Americas, Asia and Oceania tend to present themselves through a few constant elements: a short name on the shop sign, a single strong colour carried from the storefront to the advertising, and a logo set in heavy or slanted capitals. In the United States, Big 5 Sporting Goods uses white capitals on a blue field and Dunham’s Sports a slanted red wordmark, as their logo files on Wikimedia Commons show. The guides in this group look at chains in the United States, Mexico, Argentina, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, and describe each sign, logo and colour scheme as the company itself publishes it.

Store formats range from small neighbourhood shops to large units in regional malls. Big 5’s stores averaged about 10,000 square feet in 1997, the Los Angeles Times reported, while Dunham’s has taken mall and plaza units, including former department-store spaces, according to SGB Media. Shop counts in these guides are always given with the date and the source that reported them.

Ownership takes several forms. Some chains have stayed in founding families or passed to private owners; some have been listed on a stock exchange and later taken private, as Big 5 was in October 2025; others sit inside larger retail or department-store groups. Each guide states the owner as a dated source gives it, and says plainly when a business has been sold, merged or closed.

Many chains also sell ranges under their own names alongside branded goods, and publish corporate pages about their founders and owners. Each guide separates what a company says about itself from what independent, dated sources record, and treats the palette shown as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official brand colour.

From the Gulf to Singapore.

The route to Asia ran through another chain. In December 2020 GMG bought Royal Sporting House, the multi-brand sports retailer founded in Singapore in 1977, from the Al-Futtaim Group, Inside Retail Asia reported. Gulf News wrote at the time that the deal gave GMG a network through which to take Sun & Sand Sports into Asia.

That step came in May 2023, when SSS opened its first South-East Asian store at Raffles City in Singapore. Inside Retail reported in June 2023 that the store covered 11,000 square feet and had a 3D foot scanner to help customers find a fit. GMG’s president of sports pointed to LED plinths with levitating shoes on display, and said the company had introduced more than 120 brands into its markets, among them Nike, Converse and Timberland; Mohammad A. Baker named Puma, Converse and New Balance among the brands in its portfolio. GMG’s timeline marks 2023 as the year SSS entered Asia.

Across these moves the name has stayed fixed while the stores have changed. The short form SSS appears in GMG’s own pages and in trade coverage, while the full name, by Mohammad A. Baker’s account, ties the chain to the UAE’s sun and sand.

For a design guide, Sun & Sand Sports shows how a retailer can take its name from the landscape it started in and keep it as the stores move from a neighbourhood shop to malls in several countries. Compare Intersport, the sports-retail group, and Decathlon, the French sports retailer. For this guide we use dune, sun orange and a deep teal with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sun & Sand Sports’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.