Salman Khan’s brand Being Human is foraying into the Middle East by opening a flagship store in Dubai on Monday
New Delhi: At around 5:00 pm Dubai time, Being Human will open doors to its first store outside of South Asia. The 2,500 sq ft store, located on the first floor of City Centre Diera Mall, will be inaugurated by Salman Khan’s brother Arbaaz Khan.
City Centre Deira is located in the older part of Dubai and is the original flagship mall of retail and real estate conglomerate Majid Al Futtaim. The mall is home to other international and Indian fashion brands including Zara, H&M, Marks & Spencer, Balmain, American Eagle, Bershka, Fabindia, Levi’s among dozens of other labels.
Being Human currently operates about 10 stores in Bangladesh and in Nepal but this is for the first time the label is venturing out of South Asia.
“We plan to open our second and third store in Dubai by January. We will open one store in Canada next in October,” said Sanjeev Rao, chief executive of Being Human Clothing. “Then we plan to go to Saudi Arabia where we are planning to open 10-12 stores in the next two quarters.”
Currently, Being Human operates around 100 stores in India and about 10 stores in markets outside of India.
“We plan to open 50 stores this year and then we will open 100 stores each year for the next four years,” Rao said in a telephone interview from Dubai.
“We have raised the quality of our merchandise by a couple of notches and consumers are loving the international standard merchandise.”
Being Human hopes to do well in Dubai as Rao said the recall for the brand is very high in the UAE.
“We expect the Deira flagship store to do 2x business of our best store in India,” he said without divulging numbers.
Rao said in the last week since Being Human put an advertisement in Deira mall, it has attracted droves of people taking their selfies with the brand’s ad as a background.
Also, the number of followers on the company’s Dubai Instagram page went up from a mere ten followers to 6,700 in a matter of 30 minutes of the brand’s announcing opening of its flagship store.
“Dubai is an ethnic melting pot and we expect not just Indian diaspora but Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Arabs to shop at our store,” Rao said.
