From zero online presence to a complete digital commerce operation.

Libsi Markah is a medium-to-large fashion retailer in Saudi Arabia with an established branch network and real brand equity — and, until this engagement, no online presence at all.

Meanwhile the market had moved. Saudi fashion customers now discover, compare, and buy online, and every season without a digital channel handed share to competitors who had one. The company decided to compete — properly.

This was not a “build us a website” brief. Competing at parity meant launching a complete commerce operation in one move: a storefront with the full e-commerce feature set, native mobile apps, and the machinery fashion retail actually runs on — retention marketing, loyalty, influencer reach, and returns management.

The real risk was fragmentation: buying pieces from different vendors and ending up with a collection of tools instead of an operation.

I led the product side of the transformation — defining the strategy and requirements, designing the customer experience, and selecting and directing the engineering agency that built it. One product direction, one accountable owner, from brief to launch.

Launch complete, not piecemeal. A token webshop would have confirmed the market's assumption that the brand wasn't serious online. The call was to arrive at feature parity with the strongest competitors on day one — storefront, native apps, and retention working as one system.

Sequence still mattered inside that: foundation and design system first, then the storefront and apps, then the growth machinery on top.

The full e-commerce feature set was specified as one product: catalogue and merchandising, cart and checkout, payments, shipping, and a returns management flow built for fashion's exchange-heavy reality.

On top of the storefront: native iOS and Android apps as the primary retention surface, a loyalty program, lifecycle retention marketing, and an influencer marketing engine that turned the brand's offline reputation into online reach.

Everything is designed Arabic-first. RTL is not a mirrored afterthought — layout, typography, and content hierarchy are designed for Arabic reading order, with English as the secondary direction.

Customer communications — lifecycle emails and campaign templates — were rebuilt on the same system, so the brand speaks with one voice from the first touch to post-purchase.

Engineering was delivered by a carefully selected agency working under my product direction — requirements, designs, and acceptance criteria came from one place, which kept a multi-vendor build coherent from brief to launch.

The app entry infrastructure runs on AWS — S3, CloudFront, ACM, and Route 53 — serving the brand's app domains with device-aware routing. The design system ships as reusable tokens and components, so partners build against a specification rather than interpreting screenshots.

Sales grew 10× after the digital operation launched. A brand that had no online presence now runs digital as a primary growth engine — storefront, native apps, retention, loyalty, and returns working as one system.

The lesson wasn't about technology — it was about completeness. Established retailers don't lose online because they lack a website; they lose because they launch half an operation. Arriving with the whole system — commerce, apps, and the growth machinery — is what made the 10× possible.