Built From Within: The Women Who Built Anyway

Sara Chemmaa’s CV reads like a map of the global financial elite: investment banking at Société Générale, strategy consulting at McKinsey, Co-Head of Ventures at MBC Group, where she evaluated early and growth-stage investments across technology, media and consumer businesses. She was, by every conventional measure, exactly where she was supposed to be. And then she became a mother.

"What started as a personal solution," she has said of those early days, "evolved into something I never entirely planned." In 2017, frustrated by the absence of mealtime products that were simultaneously safe, functional and beautifully designed, she founded Citron, a lifestyle brand for families that would go on to sell 1.5 million products across 49 countries and 1,000 retail locations worldwide. From a challenge she faced in her own home, she built a global category leader.

But Sara's most interesting quality as a founder is not the scale she achieved, but the way she has always built in response to real life. As her children grew older and went past lunchboxes and school runs, well into teenage years, sports, travel and the busy pace of modern schedules, she expanded the brand along with them. Glow by Citron, her newest venture, is the result: a Dubai-born hydration and lifestyle brand designed for the adult is constantly on the move.

The products, which are ceramic-lined, BPA-free, spill-proof, designed with the same rigorous attention to detail that built Citron's reputation, are almost second nature to the philosophy that built them. Glow is built on the belief that hydration is an everyday habit worth investing in. And that the woman moving between a Pilates session, a board meeting and a school pickup need and deserves products that move along with her.

glowbycitron.com | @glowbycitron | @sara_chemmaa

Hanane Bouchouicha spent years  as many women with curly hair do… navigating a beauty industry that treated her hair as a problem to be solved! She straightened it, managed it and spent years trying to work around it; and then, somewhere in the middle of a career in accounting and management that had taken her from Algeria to Dubai, she stopped. She looked at her curls and decided that its not her hair that’s the problem. It’s the lack of proper products.

Zaphira Nature, which Hanane founded in 2020 after leaving the corporate world, is the UAE's first curly hair care brand, and the only one in the region manufacturing products specifically formulated for the climate its customers actually live in. The Gulf's combination of coastal humidity, desert aridity and extreme heat does things to curly hair that products developed in European or American laboratories were never designed to address. Zaphira was built to understand exactly that: every formula developed in collaboration with industry experts, every product tested against the specific environmental realities of life in this region.

But more interesting than the story of its formulation, is the philosophy behind it. Hanane speaks of curly hair care as a ritual… a daily personal practice of nourishing, cleansing, moisturising and styling, and an act of self-love. In a region where beauty has historically been synonymous with a very specific aesthetic, Zaphira is slowly and surely making a statement that natural need not always mean a compromise, and questions, when did curl become a flaw?

Hanane Bouchouicha, devoted wife, mother and entrepreneur, built that argument into every product she makes, and she continues to build it, product by product.

zaphiranature.com | @zaphiranature