Dubai soap maker sets 25,000-unit sales target to survive tourism collapse

The Camel Soap Factory needed to sell 25,000 bars of soap in three months. That was the number Lucy Bradley calculated would generate roughly Dh625,000 in direct sales revenue, enough to keep staff employed, the factory running, and give founder Stevi Lowmass the breathing room to stabilize a 13-year-old Dubai business that had been built almost entirely on tourist traffic.

When tourism to the UAE collapsed two months after the Iran war began in February, the factory faced an immediate operational crisis. Lowmass had grown the company from a home operation into a producer selling across the emirates, but that growth had been built on visitor footfall. As those numbers fell, so did revenue. The cuts came fast and personal. Among those let go was Bradley, founder of Dubai marketing agency Plug, who had spent years promoting the brand.

Bradley received one month’s notice. She used it to propose a rescue.

What emerged was Save Our Soap, a campaign built on a deliberately simple premise: go directly to the community, be honest about the situation, and make the ask as clear as possible. “I remember messaging the brand manager, and I went: ‘Let’s go to the public. Be really honest. Tell them the situation,’” Bradley recalls. She wrote the campaign’s central line herself: “Does camel soap float? Yes, if Dubai backs it.”

For Lowmass, accepting the plan meant confronting something she had avoided for 13 years. “Nobody wants to share with the wider public that you might fail,” she says. “I do remember the first post was incredibly painful. You know, saying we might have to admit defeat here.”

The execution was disciplined. Bradley rejected expensive advertising and influencer strategies in favor of direct outreach to people who already knew the brand. The factory maintained a database of approximately 7,500 customers, corporate clients, other businesses, and previous online buyers. Bradley concentrated her efforts there, supplemented by posts on her and Lowmass’s LinkedIn accounts. Emails went out twice weekly: Mondays carried the purchase call, Fridays delivered progress updates showing how close the campaign was to its target.

“If you want people to take action, you must make it super, super clear: Buy the soap. Save the factory. Here’s the link,” Bradley says.

The number 25,000 was chosen carefully. “It had to be a number that’s believable,” Bradley explains. “It had to be a number that also we could see moving, and would get excited about.”

Since the campaign launched at the end of May, more than 22,500 bars have sold, bringing the factory within striking distance of its target. Companies Lowmass had worked with a decade ago resurfaced offering free services. Other businesses amplified the appeal. “I cannot tell you what it’s done in terms of almost uniting companies and people behind,” Lowmass says. “We’ve been contacted from all sides by people just asking: ‘Can we help?’ and offering their services for free.”

Meanwhile, the crisis forced a harder look at the business model itself. For 13 years, The Camel Soap Factory had targeted tourists and the large retailers serving them. Save Our Soap introduced Lowmass to a domestic market she had never seriously pursued. “I think for us it might be quite a rich seam of business that we can explore going forward,” she says, describing what she now calls “untapped markets that are probably best not to be ignored.”

The factory’s origins were unlikely. Lowmass had spent her career in FinTech and technology before motherhood changed her calculation. A family holiday in Western Australia, visiting an olive oil soap factory surrounded by orchards where visitors could watch production and buy locally made goods, provided the model. “I remember turning around to my husband and saying: ‘This could work in Dubai. This is what we need. We need something that visitors to the country can come and see that highlights something regional,’” she recalls. She settled on camel milk as the ingredient that would give the products a distinctly local identity, taught herself soap-making by researching the world’s best practitioners, and began selling at school stands and markets before moving into industrial premises and securing initial funding from friends and family.

By 2018, annual revenue exceeded $2 million. Over its lifetime, the company has sold nearly 3.5 million products. The Covid-19 pandemic had already tested the operation severely, forcing diversification into creams, solid shampoos, haircare products, and a camel milk lip balm. That experience taught Lowmass to recognize danger signals quickly when tourism declined again this year.

Inspired by the campaign’s reach, Bradley has since created Homegrown 25, an initiative enabling local businesses with customer databases to support one another through reciprocal promotion. One company promotes another to its network; that company returns the favor. “We promote you, you promote us,” Bradley says.

Lowmass is now exploring markets outside the GCC, taking the camel milk products and their UAE story to wider audiences. Whether the factory clears its 25,000-bar target in the weeks remaining will test whether a community rally can hold long enough to become a permanent shift in how the business finds its customers.