By Shams Case Study
Social Media · Multi-Platform Ads · Brand Launch · UAE, KSA & Kuwait
About By Shams
Shams Arab artist, singer, and one of the Gulf’s most recognizable cultural figures with 8 million Instagram followers was launching something entirely new. By Shams, her astrology-inspired perfume collection, brought together twelve fragrances each crafted for a specific zodiac sign. The brand needed to exist, perform, and sell from day one.
We were brought in to build that reality: establish a luxury brand identity and social presence from the ground up, and launch it simultaneously across the UAE, KSA, and Kuwait through a full-scale paid campaign spanning six platforms. The goal was not just awareness it was to convert Shams’s cultural following into a paying customer base for a luxury product they had never seen from her before.
The Challenge
Launching a luxury fragrance brand with a celebrity at its centre sounds like the easy mode of brand building. It is not at least not when the celebrity brings a devoted audience from one world and asks them to follow her into an entirely new one:
Luxury Brand Positioning
Shams’s 8 million followers knew her as an Arab artist and performer. Converting that cultural affinity and fandom into purchasing intent for a luxury fragrance product required a distinct content and positioning strategy one that honoured her persona without reducing the brand to merchandise.
Cohesive Brand Narrative
Communicating a genuinely layered concept twelve fragrances, each tied to a zodiac sign in a way that felt cohesive and immediately compelling to audiences who had never engaged with her in a commercial context.
Brand Persona Alignment
Walking the line between personal and aspirational: Shams needed to be the face and soul of the brand without the content feeling promotional, and luxurious without feeling distant from the warmth her audience already associated with her.
Cross-Market Campaign Execution
Scaling this across three markets simultaneously from day one, each with different platform preferences, audience behaviours, and purchase patterns running six paid channels in parallel with no warm-up period and no margin for slow iteration.
Our Approach
The central strategic challenge was a conversion problem: how do you take an audience that trusts and loves a person, and get them to trust and buy from a brand?
The answer was to make sure the brand never felt separate from the person. By Shams was built as a natural extension of Shams herself, her personality, her aesthetic, her connection to each scene so that engaging with the brand felt like engaging with her. The zodiac concept gave us a content engine that could sustain that connection over time: horoscope-driven campaigns rolling out in sync with the astrological calendar, giving audiences a recurring, personal reason to return.
On the paid side, we didn’t treat the six platforms as a single broadcast. Each channel was given a specific role in the launch funnel awareness, intent capture, conversion and the creative was tailored to match the context and audience of each platform.
The Process
We executed an integrated paid media strategy across Google Ads and Meta, structured around audience segmentation, intent capture, and ongoing optimisation:
The Results
| Paid Ads
5x
Increase in ROAS
198%
Increase in Purchases
47%
Increase in Conversion Rate
| Social Media
+10K
Increase in Followers
+55%
Increase in Engagement Rate
+15M
Increase in views
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Other Players in the Market: amouage, thespiritofdubai, initioparfums, tizianaterenzi
