Localizing performance, not just language, for MENA e-commerce

The Middle East and North Africa e-commerce market is worth an estimated $155B (Mordor Intelligence, 2025). Plenty of brands enter it with a translated version of whatever worked at home. MONAYA, a fashion e-commerce brand based in Egypt, needed performance marketing built for the region from the start.

Translation gets the words right and little else. Religious context, beauty standards, modesty norms and even the pacing of a video ad shift across Arabic-speaking markets. The risk for MONAYA was an audience that could tell immediately when a brand hadn't done the work.

The strategy

Full-funnel campaigns ran across Google and Meta, built on Arabic-first creative from the first draft rather than translated copy. Models, settings and tone were developed natively for Egyptian and broader MENA audiences.

The creative

The campaign balanced religious sensitivity, regional beauty standards and local consumption habits against MONAYA's fashion-forward identity, keeping the brand authentic to Cairo without losing what made it distinct.

The results

We rebuilt the path from click to purchase end to end, covering landing pages, payment flow and logistics, closing the gap between an ad click and a completed checkout in a market where payment and delivery friction often kill conversion. In a $155B regional market most competitors enter with a copy-paste playbook, MONAYA's Arabic-native approach made localization the actual growth driver.