Retail rarely rewards patience. Trends turn over in weeks, platforms rise and fade, and the shopper who bought loyally last year may not answer the phone this one. Staying in the game for fifteen years, then, says something that a single good quarter never could. For Razzeil Maravilla, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of UNOO Trading Co. LLC, those fifteen years are less a victory lap than proof of a stubborn idea: that premium fashion can be made genuinely accessible without cutting corners on authenticity, value, or the way a customer is treated.
That idea has carried UNOO from an early entrepreneurial gamble to one of the UAE’s go-to sources for premium handbags, accessories, watches, and footwear brought in directly from the United States.
A business built across two countries
Most retailers pick a lane, either they hold a storefront or they run an online operation. UNOO runs on two continents at once. Its sourcing arm operates out of Houston, Texas, while its Al Satwa base in Dubai serves customers across the Emirates and beyond.
The setup is deliberate. By sourcing personally from the US market and shipping straight to buyers in the region, the company skips the layers of middlemen that usually inflate prices and blur a product’s origins. Customers get internationally recognized brands, verified as authentic, at a price that reflects the shorter chain between shelf and doorstep. It is a model that demands constant travel, hands-on selection, and a willingness to answer for every item personally, and Razzeil has built the business around exactly that.
“Luxury is not defined by a price tag,” she says. “It is defined by the experience, the trust, and the value we create for every customer.”
Reading the shift toward live and social selling
Part of what has kept UNOO current is timing, and part is instinct. The company leaned into livestream and social commerce well before either became a standard fixture of regional retail, and the wider numbers now show why that instinct paid off.
The UAE has turned out to be one of the most receptive markets anywhere for this kind of shopping. Roughly 72 percent of shoppers in the UAE have already used livestream shopping, placing the country well ahead of most Western markets in day-to-day usage. The broader social commerce sector has grown just as briskly. The UAE’s social commerce market is projected to reach about 15.41 billion US dollars by 2026, after expanding at a compound annual rate of 11.5 percent between 2022 and 2025.
Just as telling is what that money is being spent on. Research from Snap Inc. found that 45 percent of young shoppers in the UAE turn to social platforms during the discovery phase for luxury purchases, and 84 percent go on to complete those purchases through social channels. For a business selling premium bags and watches to a young, mobile-first audience, that is the whole market in a sentence.
Where many retailers still treat livestreams as a marketing add-on, Razzeil built them into the core of how UNOO sells. Each session pairs the immediacy of live interaction with the personal sourcing that defines the brand, so a customer watching from a phone in Sharjah is, in effect, shopping alongside the person who chose the item in Houston. That closeness is difficult to fake, and it has become UNOO’s signature.
Trust as the actual product
Ask Razzeil what she is really selling and the answer is not handbags. It is confidence. In a category crowded with counterfeits and inflated claims, she treats transparency and authenticity as non-negotiable, and she has staked the business on the belief that customers can tell the difference.
That conviction shows up in the details, in how every item is sourced, how questions get answered on a livestream in real time, and how a purchase is stood behind after the sale. The result is a community of repeat buyers who come back less for any single product than for the assurance that surrounds it. In a market where a young shopper can buy from anyone, anywhere, that assurance is the moat.
It also reflects something about who is building the business. As a woman leading a company in a competitive retail field, Razzeil belongs to a generation of entrepreneurs pairing commercial sharpness with creativity and staying power. She has kept pushing at how things are usually done, folding in social commerce, live selling, and loyalty-driven programs designed to reward customers over the long haul rather than chase a one-time sale.
The next fifteen years
For all the weight of the anniversary, Razzeil frames the first fifteen years as a foundation rather than a finish line. UNOO is preparing to widen its physical footprint across the UAE, carrying its particular blend of personal sourcing and live retail into more communities while cementing its standing among the country’s premium fashion names.
The timing works in its favor. The forces that lifted the business, a young population, deep social media use, and a clear regional appetite for buying luxury through a screen, are still gaining strength rather than leveling off. UNOO is also opening the door to conversations with strategic partners and investors who share its outlook on innovation, measured expansion, and the long project of building one of the region’s most recognized names in accessible luxury.
Razzeil’s own ambition reaches past the storefront. She wants UNOO to become a globally recognized brand, one that people associate with accessibility, authenticity, and a shopping experience worth returning to. With operations already established in Houston and Dubai, additional branches planned across the UAE, and a defined long-term strategy in place, the groundwork is laid.
Fifteen years in, the through-line has not changed. It is still the same conviction that opened the first chapter, that real luxury is measured by the trust and value delivered to each customer, and that a business built on that principle can keep growing without ever losing what made it worth building.
