A new stock app that store teams actually like using

Ghaf Markets runs 310 neighbourhood grocery stores across the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Store teams checked shelves for gaps with ageing handheld scanners and a paper list, then reordered from a back-office PC that often had a queue.

Gaps went unnoticed until the afternoon, and head office couldn’t see which stores were struggling until the weekly report. An off-the-shelf app had been trialled and abandoned: staff said it was slower than paper.

Our Dubai design team spent the first week working shifts in four stores in Dubai and Sharjah, scanning shelves and stacking deliveries alongside store staff. The brief that came out of it was short: one hand, one scan, under two seconds, and it must work in the back of the store where there’s no signal.

We built an offline-first app for the phones staff already carried, in English, Arabic and Hindi, with a gap scan that suggests the reorder on the spot. Ten pilot stores had it after eight weeks; we changed it eleven times in the first month based on what staff told us.

The app reached all 310 stores in five months, with a store-by-store dashboard for regional managers. Ghaf Markets’ product team, which we helped grow from three to nine people, now runs it.

Six people from our Dubai studio worked on it for nine months: a designer, a delivery lead, a tech lead and three engineers.