Turning a Trade Stand Into a Brand Experience
Sterling Perfumes is the Dubai fragrance house behind ARMAF, Risala and Hamidi, with ARMAF alone sold in more than 100 countries. Beautyworld Middle East, which its organisers describe as the largest international trade fair for beauty and fragrance in the Middle East, is where Sterling meets the buyers, distributors and creators who shape its year. For 2025, Sterling asked us to design and deliver its presence at the show: three houses with very different personalities under one roof, and a setting for ARMAF to match its standing in the season Club de Nuit Bling launched.
Beautyworld is a hall of stands competing for attention, most of them built from product walls and bright light, and visitors leave having absorbed everything and remembered little. Sterling needed buyers, distributors and creators to leave seeing ARMAF as a luxury fragrance house that belongs beside the global names. At the same time, three brands had to share one stand without blurring into each other: ARMAF, dark and enigmatic; Risala, fresh and contemporary; and Hamidi, rooted in Arabian perfumery. The opportunity was to let visitors experience each brand first-hand, turning a trade stand into a brand experience that still did business.
We designed the stand as a space between time, a calm twilight set apart from the noise of the hall. ARMAF came first. Beneath 6-metre columns, mirrored surfaces and a white laser canopy, eight hero fragrances, Club de Nuit Bling among them, floated on levitating displays in an installation called Refracted Time. Misting jets released fragrance notes into the air, and light and sound responded as visitors moved through the space. Beyond it, a second ARMAF zone and a full product wall took visitors from spectacle to the range itself.
From ARMAF, visitors passed into Risala, calm, curated and social, which carried the same aesthetic into a lighter, contemporary register and gave both brands a place for conversation. Hamidi was a complete change of scene: counters sculpted like dunes in ochre, copper and burnt orange, with hundreds of scent strips hanging overhead, each carrying one of the house’s fragrance names.
The ARMAF stand drew more than 300 global creators, media figures and industry leaders, and press coverage reported one of the largest crowds at the show. In blind-nosing sessions on the stand, participants consistently rated ARMAF fragrances among the most premium on offer, and Ebraheem Al Samadi, the face of Club de Nuit Bling, made a special appearance. The stand proved that a presence could behave like a brand experience and still close deals, and Sterling brought us back for its 2026 presence and to create the ARMAF brand identity.
