Return per square metre. Adjacency planning. Buying budgets and product selection. Supply chain. Systems, structure and the people who run them.
We do not stop at strategy. We stay until it works. This is how a business actually runs, examined properly and then put right. Most of it is unglamorous. All of it shows up in the numbers.
The answer is usually not the one the business came with. A store that is not trading may be in the wrong building. An inventory problem may be a missing channel. Finding that is the first half of the work.
The second half is delivering it. We work inside the business, not alongside it, and we assemble whatever the job needs: Private Team's own supervised teams and trainers where the work is operational, specialists brought in where it is not, and one accountable party from the first question to the day it runs without us.
Commercial performance, structure and profitability. Where the money goes, and where it does not come back.
Brands, products and suppliers, found at source.
People, standards, replenishment and execution. Implemented alongside the business, not handed over as a document.
From concept to opening, or mapping a business already running.
Most of this was learned in retail. Little of it is confined to retail.
Private Team is owned and run by retailers. The judgement sold here is the judgement its owners built running international retail, and it comes with an operating company behind it rather than a consultant's business card.
Twenty nine years across the GCC and MENA. All of it was done with teams and none of it alone. What follows is where the experience was built, not a claim on anyone's business.
across six
markets
Brands sought and signed at source across Europe and Asia: Japan, China, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Turkey, South Korea and Lebanon.
International brands negotiated and introduced to the MENA market, across fashion, beauty, home and lifestyle. Those agreements were between companies, so they are described here rather than named.
Feras Owaidat — Managing Partner, Private Team Services and Projects. Twenty nine years across Al Futtaim, Salam Studio and Stores, Equinox Global Investments and The Blue Group, in commercial, operations and general management.
The work is his, with Private Team's own teams where it is operational and specialists brought in where it is not.
The work below was done by the people who run this practice, in the businesses they ran before it, alongside the teams and owners those businesses belong to. It is set out here as experience, not as a claim of authorship. It is the reason clients come to Private Team for this rather than for a report.
Sports Corner on Salwa Road was trading, and stuck. Two floors of a building that limited what the store could ever be. The brief was to improve performance. The answer was to leave.
A site was found across the road, close to twice the space on a single floor, and the case for moving was made to the owners. Then the whole chain: the deal, the rent, a trip to London to brief the architects, the design carried through to build, and the opening.
It reopened opposite where it had stood, and now trades at more than twice the old store.
Salam Studio and Stores had too much stock and no way to move it. Qatar had no outlet at all, and the case was made internally for building one. The site, the trade licence, the furniture, and a campaign positioning it as the country’s first.
It was planned for three days.
It ran for a week, because the owner saw the first day’s trading and asked for more.
An online retailer wanted to become a physical one. It was taken from nothing to open: the business plan, the designer, the contractor, the location.
The brief was to hand it over and leave.
They asked for the operation as well. Supplier negotiation, standard operating procedures, daily running and sales. The opening is the introduction. The operation is the work.
Bahrain first, on the team opening Marks and Spencer for Al Futtaim. The work was commercial: making the case internally for the collection the market deserved rather than the one it was allocated, then proving it in the trading.
Then Abu Dhabi, on the operation. Three years, including a relayout that put ladieswear at the front of the store, against every department store convention. It worked.
Then Toys R Us in Sharjah in 2002, a category with no prior experience behind it. Design, layout, full set up.
A global sports licence, won for a group by presenting what it already had: internal designers who could carry a private label, and a distribution network that could reach the local market.
Winning it was the beginning. Then the design work, production sourced across South Asia, and a wholesale channel built to move it.
The licence was the group’s. The case for it, and the operation behind it, was the work.
No proposal arrives before the business is understood.
A conversation. What the business is, and where it is stuck.
The requirement, understood properly rather than taken at face value.
A questionnaire, so the picture is complete before anyone commits.
A meeting, to test what the answers actually mean.
A scope, designed around what the work turns out to be.
Commercials, agreed. Then the work starts.
Tell us what the business is and where it is stuck. If we are the right people for it, we will say so. If we are not, we will say that too.
Get in touchMaysloon Street, Doha