Ece Baltacı Mallak, the founder of the new skincare brand SADE, is determined to give women products that multitask just like them.
It was the first word I thought of,” says Ece Baltacı Mallak, the founder of SADE, about how she chose the name of her new Dubai-born clean skincare brand. “I am such an overthinker. I brainstormed for about a month and came up with several names. But it just kept sticking.” In Turkish, “sade” means simple, plain, or pure—like coffee without sugar or a design stripped of ornament. In Arabic and Urdu, “sada” or “sadeh” describes something without additions. And in classical Arabic, it translates to “echo”—a quiet reverberation that stays with you long after the moment has passed. “It is a word that travels across cultures,” shares Baltacı Mallak. “When you hear it, you don’t really think it’s Arabic; you don’t really think it’s Turkish. It feels international. That’s the feeling I wanted.”
International. It is a word that also suits the founder herself rather well. Born in Turkey, holding a degree in industrial engineering from Sabancı University in Istanbul and a double master’s in international management that sounds, on paper, like an itinerary rather than an education, from Northeastern University in Boston and Università Cattolica in Milan—Baltacı Mallak eventually landed in Dubai a little over four years ago. Before she launched SADE, she was leading brand and global growth at Kitopi, overseeing brand positioning and go-to-market strategy. And before that, she held leadership roles at Kolektif House and was focused on international expansion work at Insider as the company began to pick up steam. Suffice it to say, the woman knows how to build things. And yet. Strip all of that away—the MBA, the startup credentials, and the corporate architecture—and that is where the real genesis of SADE can be found. It is, like the best sorts of origin story, almost embarrassingly human.
“It came from a frustration more than anything super romantic,” recounts Baltacı Mallak, with a frankness that is immediately disarming. She was traveling constantly for work, jumping between climates, between flights, between time zones. And her skin was paying the price. But the real culprit, she realized, wasn’t the travel. “The real problem was all of this accumulated product on my shelf. Every morning, before I had even started my day, I was trying to figure out the regimen—what am I going to start with, what am I going to do next, how do I layer, which goes first, which goes last?” The endless options and pairings of products made having a practical on-the-go skincare routine frustratingly complex.
Baltacı Mallak found herself returning, again and again, to the image of her grandmother. A woman who kept her own daily beauty regimen to two or three products. A cleanser, a good SPF, and a good moisturizer. “She was using only these three products,” the founder recalls. “So I kept coming back to it—why am I not doing this?” That memory was the starting point of an idea, but it needed to be updated to the demands of modern-day living. Something the founder understood implicitly. “I want to be very clear. I am not romanticizing that time, because I know women’s lives look very different now. My life is very different. I am the customer. The woman dealing with forty-five degrees of heat, harsh air conditioning, and long-haul flights.” So she decided to onboard that fundamental philosophy of “less is more” and strip it of nostalgia to rebuild the concept for the reality of 2026. That philosophy is where SADE gets genuinely interesting. Because what Baltacı Mallak has done is not simply propose to women fewer products. She has engineered each one to do the work of several—and that distinction, she is at pains to make clear, matters enormously.
“I want to be careful when you say three-in-one,” she says, leaning forward slightly. “Because you think—oh, like a men’s product, not good quality. No, it’s not that.” The three-in-one moisturizer, for instance, covers barrier repair, moisturizing, and nourishing. It is not a shortcut. It is a formula—developed in close collaboration with partner laboratories in Turkey and Korea—that has been engineered to do what five products were previously failing to do together. “I was using a primer, a hydrator, a good moisturizer, an SPF, and then a serum or something. That’s already five products in my hands before I had even started.” The multifunctionality, in other words, is not about doing less. It is about doing more in fewer steps. The hero product—the one that has Baltacı Mallak genuinely animated—is the one she describes as unlike anything else on the market: a 5-in-1 SPF 50 PA++++ that delivers sun protection while functioning as a primer, a glow serum, a screen against blue light, and a daily moisturizer. “It gives this glow and this primer effect, but it’s also SPF 50,” she explains. “I got into the concentration of environmental stress, blue screen, all of that, which is why we added the PA++++ effect. I am super proud of it.”
In the end, the gap she identified in the market was never purely a skincare gap. “It was a life gap,” she says. “We needed a brand that understands this market, that thinks of this market, that thinks of what our skin actually needs. Because you’re not going to understand how harsh it can be in Dubai when you move from forty-five-degree temperatures outside into an eighteen-degree air-conditioned office if you haven’t lived it. ” SADE exists for that woman—the one navigating extreme climates, packed schedules, and the particular indignity of being handed yet another twelve-step beauty routine when what she actually needs is three products that genuinely work. “I am building SADE for that woman,” Baltacı Mallak says with conviction. The proof is already in the numbers, though she mentions them with the same understated confidence she brings to everything else. A 43 per cent repeat purchase rate in just her six months in business. A customer acquisition rate of around two percent—meaning, people are telling other people in real life without being asked. “I see an order for tonnes of the same product,” she says with a smile. “People come back for their friends, their moms, their sisters, and I see a lot of follow-up orders.” It is the specificity of what SADE aims to do that has garnered it such a strong traction right out of the gate. It has been designed for a specific woman with a specific lifestyle looking for a streamlined option for her skincare routine that will work as hard as they do. “I want a woman to find SADE and feel understood,” reflects the founder. “I want her to feel that someone finally built something with her actual life in mind—not a romanticized life, not the life she’s supposed to have, but the one she’s actually living.”
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