Guest Articles

Staff salaries were being cut. Things were grim. Eventually, they couldn't afford to retain my agency, Plug, either. I was working my month's notice when, walking home one day, I had a thought: one last hurrah. Let's save the factory.

I love coming up with ideas to help my clients, but this felt different. I was genuinely determined that this 16-year-old homegrown UAE manufacturer wasn't going to disappear without us trying everything we could. And actually, I was pretty confident we could do it.

Why? Because The Camel Soap Factory had something incredibly valuable: a database of around 7,500 people.

That might not sound particularly exciting, but you'd be amazed how many businesses in the UAE don't have a proper customer database. Even more bonkers, plenty of those that do have one barely communicate with it. The Camel Soap Factory had spent years building theirs – past customers, current customers, corporate contacts and people who already knew the brand. To me, it was a gold mine.

We're constantly being told that to find customers we need more followers, more social media content, influencers, funnels, Meta advertising and increasingly AI. I looked at 7,500 people who already knew the business and thought: why don't we start there?

There was one fairly major hurdle. We had to tell people the truth. The Camel Soap Factory was struggling and needed help.

For founder Stevi Lowmass, publicly admitting that wasn't easy. Imagine spending 16 years building a business and then announcing to your customers that you might lose it. Understandably, she was reluctant. But eventually, Stevi and the team agreed to run with my slightly mad idea and see what I could do.

The campaign became Save Our Soap. The target was ambitious: sell 25,000 bars of soap in three months. And the message couldn't have been simpler: Save Our Soap. Buy a bar of soap.

That simplicity was deliberate. When you want somebody to take action, don't make them work out what you're asking them to do. We weren't asking people to understand a complicated business situation or giving them six different calls to action. We simply said: we need your help. Buy a bar of soap and help us keep the factory going.

Within the first week, we'd shifted more than 1,000 bars. That's when we knew we had something.

So, what did we do next? We repeated ourselves. Again and again.

Twice a week, like clockwork, we communicated with the database. We told people how many bars we'd sold. We celebrated milestones. We thanked them. We reminded them why we were doing it. And then we asked them again to buy a bar, share the story or tell someone else about the campaign.

We contacted past customers, current customers, corporate contacts and anyone already on the company's radar. Stevi shared the campaign on LinkedIn. I shared it with my LinkedIn network. The team got behind it.

We tried social media too. The engagement was virtually zero. So I stopped worrying about it. Why keep throwing effort at something because that's what marketers are apparently supposed to do when something else is demonstrably working? We went straight back to the data.

There is another reason I believe this campaign worked: Stevi trusted me.

When your business is in trouble, handing over control to somebody else is incredibly difficult. There's a temptation as a business owner to think you need to do everything yourself, particularly when every decision suddenly feels critical. But Stevi had brought me in as an adviser, and when it really mattered, she trusted my judgement. She trusted the process, she trusted my reasons for doing things the way I wanted to do them, and she allowed me to get on with it. Not every business owner would have done that.

And that trust gave us the freedom to stay focused rather than constantly changing direction.

Perhaps the most important outcome of the campaign, however, wasn't simply the number of bars we sold.

Historically, The Camel Soap Factory had relied heavily on tourists and corporate customers. There was a small domestic customer base, but it hadn't really been a major focus. When the tourist market disappeared, that suddenly became a huge vulnerability.

Save Our Soap proved there was another market sitting right under our noses.

UAE residents wanted to buy the product. They cared about keeping a homegrown manufacturer alive. They told their friends. They bought gifts. They came back and bought again.

The campaign didn't simply buy the factory critical time. It helped uncover a domestic market that could become an important part of its future.

As I write this, 24,580 bars of soap have been sold. We're just 420 bars away from our 25,000 target.

We didn't build an elaborate funnel. We didn't hire an influencer. We didn't pour a fortune into Meta. And we certainly didn't spend every day desperately trying to create content in the hope that an algorithm might eventually put it in front of someone.

We had a clear message, an existing audience, consistent communication and a founder brave enough to ask for help – and brave enough to trust the person she'd brought in to help her.

Sometimes marketing isn't about finding thousands of new people.

Sometimes the people who can save your business are already sitting in your database. You just have to talk to them.