The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2017–2019
My Perfumes bet 60% of its output on ethyl alcohol — one ruling made it unsellable
A 24-year-old Dubai mass-market perfume house lost its core ingredient overnight when its community's leader ruled ethyl alcohol unlawful
My Perfumes
What happened
My Perfumes, founded in the mid-1990s and run from a plant in Dubai's Al Ghusais, was a mass-market fragrance and body-spray maker with capacity for 35,000 bottles of fragrance and 50,000 body sprays a day. Ethyl alcohol — the standard base of commercial perfumery — carried about 60% of its output.
In February 2018 the company stopped production of everything ethyl alcohol-based and closed every one of its own stores. The trigger was a ruling from the leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community that ethyl alcohol use violated Sharia; the company complied immediately, and 60% of the plant's production sat idle.
Managing Director Mustafa Firoz then took the 24-year-old business back into what Gulf News called start-up mode: roughly eight months developing a silicon-based fragrance formulation with suppliers in France and Switzerland, before relaunching a 100 ml silicon-based perfume at Dh670 — a steep price for a house built on mass-market volume, with production ramping only as demand proves out.
Why it happened
- Sixty per cent of output rested on a single input whose acceptability one authority could redefine — concentration, not chemistry, was the exposure.
- No reformulated alternative existed when the ruling came, so the halt became an open-ended shutdown while a replacement base was built from scratch.
- Mass-market price points left no margin cushion to fund the pivot; the relaunch product had to jump to Dh670 to cover the new base.
The lesson
Inputs and markets that depend on one authority's interpretation — religious, regulatory or platform — carry flip-risk you don't control. Keep a qualified alternative formulation before you need it.
Sources
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