When performance wear brand SQUATWOLF opened its first flagship store in Kuwait at The Avenues mall on Friday, 10 April, it broke its biggest single-day retail sales record.
Then it broke that record again on Saturday, 11 April. For perspective, the store in Kuwait had been open for less than 48 hours.
To anyone watching from the outside, it looked like a spectacular launch. To the brand, it felt like an inevitability.
“That distinction matters. And it goes to the heart of how we think about retail expansion,” said Anam Khalid, Founder and Co-CEO of SQUATWOLF in conversation with Campaign Middle East.
The Kuwait opening was not a moment of brand introduction in Kuwait. The honest truth: SQUATWOLF had been present in the market for years through e-commmerce and for more than a year through its partnership with Ali Abdulwahab Al Mutawa Commercial Co. and their INTERSPORT Group network.
Within months of that launch in INTERSPORT, SQUATWOLF had become the number one performing training apparel brand across their doors.
Khalid explained, “Our e-commerce presence had already built significant awareness across the country. By the time the flagship at The Avenues opened, Kuwait already knew who we were. The community existed before the store did.”
She added, “This is the model we believe in, and increasingly the only model that makes sense for us as a brand.”
“You cannot open a flagship and then build community. You build community and then open a flagship to give it somewhere to gather. The store is not the beginning of the relationship, it is the relationship becoming physical.”
– Anam Khalid, Founder and Co-CEO, SQUATWOLF
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What happened on the opening day of the SQUATWOLF flagship store in The Avenues in Kuwait reflected that.
Every fitness influencer, every sports news page in Kuwait rallied behind the launch. The campaign theme: “From Dubai to Kuwait” travelled organically across the community because it articulated something they already felt.
The in-mall takeover at The Avenues, with SQUATWOLF content running across every screen in Kuwait’s largest mall, was not an awareness exercise.
“Awareness was not the problem. It was a celebration. It told a community that had been with us online and in INTERSPORT stores: you have a home here now,” Khalid said.
“The record-breaking sales were the community’s response to that invitation,” she added.
This challenges a fairly persistent assumption in retail that the flagship is the proof of concept, the moment people find out whether the market wants you.
Khalid said, “We’d argue that by the time you open a flagship, you should already know the answer. The proof of concept happens in the years before: in the e-commerce data, in the sell-through rates at wholesale partners, in whether people in that market are tagging your brand, searching your brand, asking when you’re arriving. Kuwait was telling us it was ready long before we opened a door.”
For SQUATWOLF, born in Dubai in 2016 in the apartment of Founders Anam Khalid and Wajdan Gul, this approach was partly necessity and partly conviction.
Khalid explained, “We could not afford to take big swings in new markets without evidence. So we built the evidence first. Qatar was our first step outside the UAE, Kuwait our second, and the same discipline applied to both. Enter through partnership, prove the demand, let the community grow, then meet it with a flagship it has already been waiting for.”
The result in Kuwait is so much more than a marketing story: two consecutive record-breaking days, a market-wide campaign moment and a community that showed up.
Khalid concluded, “This is what happens when a brand stops treating retail expansion as a customer acquisition strategy and starts treating it as a community payoff. The store was the last step. Everything that made it successful happened long before the doors opened.”
