Lattafa

A bet against the current of the Gulf market

Sheikh Shahid Ahmad arrived in Dubai from Pakistan and worked for thirteen years in his uncle's perfume shop. In 2021 he recounted a market where everyone turned to French fragrances and sought to imitate Western codes, and his decision to introduce, in contrast, a line of Arabic perfumes.

The house was founded with Shoaib Iqbal. It dates its own beginnings to the 1980s without giving a specific year; 1980 circulates widely, sometimes 1982, without the house settling the matter. The company remains family-run and is now in its third generation.

From the Gulf to the rest of the world

The Lattafa brand proper dates to 1992, when the house carried its business beyond the Middle East. It claimed to cover more than sixty countries in 2021, more than one hundred and twenty today, and runs seven perfume brands, spanning both Arabic and Western registers.

The founder explains that he placed holographic labels on all his products to distinguish them from copies — a direct concern in a sector where the house ranks among the most imitated.

Yara, Khamrah and the question of price

The name comes, according to the house, from the Arabic words latif and lateefa, which speak of softness and pleasantness. The catalogue covers classic oriental registers, oud and amber, as much as the sweet gourmands that carried the brand to a young audience.

Yara and Khamrah are the two references that made the house known outside the Gulf, carried by social media. The ratio between the concentration of the juices and their price explains most of this following.