This week, we speak to Shaima Sibtain, founder & CEO of LUVED, a platform that redefines circular luxury in the UAE.
Welcome to the Emirates Woman weekly series ‘How I Got My Job As…,’ where we speak to some incredible entrepreneurs and businesswomen, both based in the UAE and globally, to find out about their career paths that led them to where they are now; what their daily routines look like; the advice they’d give to those starting out; and the hurdles they’ve had to overcome.
Designed as an easy-to-use app, Luved is created where premium and everyday preloved fashion and lifestyle pieces can be purchased. Shaima talks about how she built Luved to be the most trusted brand around the community that is built around taste, curation, and connections.
To delve into her journey further, Emirates Woman sat down to see how her journey began.
What was the specific frustration in your own wardrobe clear-out that pushed you from “Someone needs to fix this” to “I’m fixing this myself” and led you to launch the brand?
It was the gap between two extremes: wrestling a second-hand sofa into my car and handing over cash to a stranger from a Facebook group, and driving across the city to five drop-offs just to rehome perfectly good kids’ clothes. I’d sold on Vinted and Vestiaire and given things away on Olio back in London, so I knew how seamless this could feel and how far the UAE experience was from it. Plenty of people have had the idea; the difference is execution. I’m also not someone who waits for the problem to be solved. I’d rather solve it.
Everyone talks about sustainability in the UAE, but you’ve called the experience fragmented. What’s the one friction point other platforms keep ignoring?
Delivery and secure payment: the two things that actually make a transaction feel safe. They’re entirely absent from the WhatsApp groups, Facebook threads, and Dubizzle listings people currently rely on. Post something in a WhatsApp group, and within seconds it’s vanished under everyone else’s. Everyone’s talking about sustainability; almost no one has fixed the mechanics of the exchange itself. What sets us apart is that we’ve closed that gap end to end, entirely within the app. Sellers are verified. They keep their listings and stay in full control right up until something sells. Delivery is taken care of for you, with the buyer and seller simply agreeing on a date. Payments and refunds move seamlessly through the platform. The whole process is automated into one effortless experience, and that’s exactly where we’ve invested: in the technology and scalability to remove the friction others have left in place. We’re now also introducing B2B, giving businesses in the preloved space an extra sales channel and real visibility.
View this post on Instagram
Zero commission sounds almost too good to be true. Can you walk us through the business model?
Yes, at the moment it’s a zero-commission model for sellers, where they can keep the full value of their listed items. This was important to us as we wanted to build trust within our community in the early stages. However, there is a 10% buyer protection fee for buyers that’s applied at checkout, plus a separate delivery fee on top, which includes packaging at no extra cost. The buyer protection fee isn’t just a charge; it’s what enables refunds, dispute resolution, and support if a buyer and seller don’t see eye to eye. When we come out of the pilot phase, we will be introducing a 10% seller commission, so the cost sits evenly on both sides. But I’m in no rush to monetize; we’re minimizing margin to maximize growth and are focused on building trust and scaling the platform. You earn the right to charge by earning trust first, so right now, the community comes before the commission.
You’re layering Entrupy AI with human expert review. Why both? What does the machine miss that only a trained eye catches?
AI is only as good as what you teach it. As the first Entrupy partner in Dubai working with their SDK, we’ve seen what the technology does that no person can; it reads microscopic inconsistencies the eye will never register, processing millions of data points per image and cross-referencing millions of authentic and counterfeit pieces in seconds. The trained eye comes in afterward, confirming every result meets Entrupy’s standard before it reaches you. And it doesn’t stop at the certificate; fingerprint technology confirms the bag you receive is the exact one that was authenticated. That’s why they’ll stand behind it with a financial guarantee. Machine and human, each doing what the other can’t.
Luved & Gifted reframes giving things away. What’s the emotional shift you’re trying to engineer, and how do you make cast-offs feel aspirational?
It’s not about making cast-offs feel aspirational; it’s about dignity on both sides. The joy of knowing something you loved will be loved again and the ease of finding something you need without it costing the earth. That quiet exchange is the whole beauty of circular fashion.
AI pricing and five-second listings make selling frictionless. But if a machine sets the value, does the seller’s emotional attachment to their piece even matter anymore?
The two are entirely separate. You can be hopelessly attached to something worth nothing and indifferent to something worth a fortune; emotion has never been about the number. What we’ve built isn’t a machine that decides what your piece is worth; it’s one that hands you the knowledge to decide for yourself. The single biggest hurdle I hear from sellers is “I just don’t know what to charge.” We remove that hesitation. The price is still yours; you’re simply setting it from a place of knowledge rather than guesswork.
The Founding 500 gets badges, priority, and early access. Is this about building real culture from the ground up?
Yes, entirely. Culture can’t be bought, and it’s the foundation of everything we’re building. I want a UAE community where trust runs both ways: where you trust LUVED and you trust the person you’re buying from to send you precisely what they described. We’ve also just brought on a female driver for our deliveries, which is a small thing on paper, but it tells you exactly the kind of community we’re building, one that reflects our commitment to making the entire experience feel safe, trusted, comfortable, and looked after at every step, especially for many of the women who use our platform. It’s intangible, yet the most valuable thing we own.
What do you see the brand growing into in the next 5 years?
Live selling is what excites me most right now; it’s still a new idea for this region, and I think it could change the way people shop for preloved items here. Beyond that: expansion across the GCC and our AI marketplace assistant, the ‘LUVBOT,’ which launches this week and guides users end to end, learning and improving as it goes. We’re also bringing the platform into Arabic, with chat translation already built in, and adding gamified gifting, a leaderboard for who gives the most. And beyond fashion and lifestyle, we’re also expanding our categories by introducing a new Home/Living category within this year. Whatever comes next, staying at the front of the technology isn’t optional for us; it’s the point.
For more on luxury lifestyle, news, fashion and beauty follow Emirates Woman on Facebook and Instagram
Images: Supplied
