Many have been asking me on how to find a good location in Kuwait or a store in one of the new malls around. The answer is a very tiring procedure and sometimes may take up to one year of searching but this all depends on your budget, if your budget was an open one then you can always find a store in a couple of days and whatever location you choose, but when constrained with a certain budget patience is the answer. Always keep your eyes open for new buildings coming out in places you would like to own a store in. For me it would be the salmiya area, and even watch news about new malls popping out. A ideal strategy is to visit the known real estate companies in Kuwait that are concentrated in building malls: Tamdeen RE, Commercail RE  such companies are building now the Kuwait 360 and the dome in Abu Hulaifa respectively. When approaching such new malls that are still in the drawing board stage you get better chances of finding a store, why because such companies like to see committed business people that provide all the details about the store before even finding a place, and when i mean all the detail i mean: store layout, concept, design, logo, projected sales etc the more information you provide the better the chance you got. I still did not introduce the variable ” wasta” because this alone plays a major role in the store acquisition and may delete other basic requirements. What people do not see here is when you start small and create a successful retail shop in one mall in Kuwait, it becomes much easier to acquire another one in a newer mall by providing that you got one successfully running now. But this may even turn out as a two edged sword!? because managment of the new malls only want new concepts and nothing repetitive, so when presenting a concept again and again you may get declined just because you have such a store somewhere else. Who ever said starting a business is easy! if it was then people all around would have been millionaires of some sort:P this approach of finding a store require an act of balance and some insider information from such real estate companies. (Pic via tamdeenrealestate.com)

  

I have always liked the coin laundry mat,  (a coin laundry mat is the washing machine that you operate by inserting your clothes and a small fee) the ones you get in the states, but dont ask me why:P So one day i figured would a coin operated laundry mat work in Kuwait? Before i start researching any business i would always ask people around me about the idea and i start my search from there. Everybody said”imagine a Kuwaiti going to a coin laundry dropping his boxers there” (note: dont tell them that you have done it in the states:P) so they may have a point, but what about the unskilled workers in Kuwait, they are about 1 million. Dont they wash theirclothes? some idiots even said NO they dont!, because he is calculating the normal laundry expenses and relating it to a guy with a 80 KD salary. So i had to know if the idea works or not but one major problem was the language barrier which i had to face. So i made a simple questionnaire which included questions like, do you wash your clothes in a laundry? if you do how often? how much do you spend monthly on the laundry? then after i went and translated the questionnaire into 5 languages. Indian: tamil malayalam, hindu, urdu then comes Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Singalese. I even had a hard time getting the questionnaire done, i had to label each to know what language it was. So i took of to Kuwait city and some places in salmiya. The strange thing that came out was, every body used a laundry, and they paid an average of 5kd per month for the service which included 4 to 5 pieces of clothing only per week, they had delivery service too but was very slow, slow i mean it takes a week! most had monthly subscription fees, and an employee passes by on a bike to pick the clothes of the workers each day. So as you can see there is a hidden system there, so my next question is do you think a coin operated laundry mat would work? paying 500fils to wash more than 10 pieces of clothing, but then you have to dry and iron them too, would such an idea be accepted?

Wondering around in sultan center salmiyah, i was looking for gym gloves. So i asked around till i found the shelve that has them all, well one i say all it was only Nike but different kinds. I’m not a fan of Nike, due to there bad record of using small kids aged 13 to get these garments, shoes and other sport apparel made (called sweat shops). so i tend to find other brands than Nike. But when i was there, searching for another brand, i only found them really high up. Too high that i cant even reach them to try them out, most who know me personally know how tall i’m:p briefly quite short:). Anyways, due to the placing of the gloves, i stood there for about five minutes and the only gloves i saw where Nike’s. I even called an assistant just to get to the higher non Nike brand gloves. The point i’m making here, is that even in coops through out Kuwait, its always the well know brands are at the average eye sight of customers. You can test this your self, most unknown brands are at the bottom or top. After investigating such positioning of items, it seems that these brand owners pay for space rental at coops, and pay a little bit extra for putting such items in front. A friend of mine started a small plastic factory where he creates these plastic mats that are placed on the floor for food serving. His product was substantioly cheaper compared to same products in the coop, but when his product was placed in the shelves of coops it was always placed at the back. Think about it who cares what brand of plastic food mat you need, most probably the cheapest, right. But from my friends perspective, his product was not selling. After noticing that his product was always placed at the back of the shelves, he understood he had to pay a bribe, to get his product at the front for customers to see and buy. Some things never seem as there are unless you get your hands dirty.  

So i’ve visited the most talked about mall in Kuwait, the Avenue mall. personally the mall sucked big time, please let me explain: One, it should be called AlShaya Mall not Avenue, Two, there is nothing close to it that looks like an Avenue, maybe they where referring to Jleeb Shyoukh, Third, you know when you sit in marina mall in the center”the dome” cafe’s there for an hour and then you get this headache from all the noises being centered in the dome, same thing with avenue mall but it’s alot larger and more noise. I walked around for 30m and could not stand the noise. Fourth, bad design, the mall was leaking when it rained heavily the past weekend. Now for the finale: the rumor behind the Avenue is that when the old management where still working out the shops to be opened there, they had a rule. To open a shop in the avenue you must only open such a store in the avenue mall only! meaning if i owned the brand shop of Lacoste, and had a store in salhiya. I must close the salhiya store and open it in the Avenue Mall. The rumor sound reasonable because you had to make such a mall unique because of  its location. So when AlShaya group came in to open up stores, they were rejected or they had to close down all there other locations and open in the Avenue” yah right”. So what happened is AlShaya group bought the place and throw the old management out and comes in the Kingdom of AlShaya in!