Sheela Foam’s flagship sleep and comfort brands, Sleepwell and Kurl-on, have appointed The Brand Bee as their integrated communications and growth partner across the Middle East and North Africa.
The mandate, awarded by Sheela Foam Trading L.L.C., covers brand e-commerce, media, digital, content and retail. Early work will concentrate on two anchor markets: the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
What the mandate covers
Rather than a single-discipline brief, this is a full-funnel engagement. The agency has been tasked with building awareness and engagement at the top, then carrying that through to customer acquisition and purchase across the region.
- Brand e-commerce — owned and marketplace storefronts
- Media — paid planning and buying across MENA markets
- Digital — performance and always-on activity
- Content — creative built for local relevance
- Retail — in-store and shopper-facing execution
Kumar Ghanshyam Brijwani, Business Head – MENA Region at Sheela Foam Trading L.L.C., described MENA as an important growth region for the company, adding that the priority as the business scales is building strong brands and an integrated ecosystem supporting consumer acquisition, retail and commerce.
Why an integrated brief, and why now
Ajay Pandey, Vice President – Marketing at Sheela Foam, said the ambition is to make Sleepwell and Kurl-on strong, relevant and trusted brands in MENA, and that this requires an approach spanning brand building, communication, media, digital, retail and commerce.
That framing is telling. Mattresses and sleep products are a considered, high-ticket, low-frequency category. Consumers research online, but a meaningful share of conversion still happens in physical retail, where feel and trial matter. Splitting brand, media and shopper duties across three agencies tends to produce three different stories. Consolidating them under one partner is a bet on message consistency and faster feedback loops between what the media buy promises and what the store shelf delivers.
Deeptanshu Bansal, Founder and CEO of The Brand Bee, said the expanded mandate is about taking strategy “beyond the brief” and making it work in-market across brand, media, digital, commerce and retail.
The agency side of the story
The Brand Bee has an on-ground presence in Dubai alongside offices in Gurgaon, London, New York and Sydney. The MENA win extends an existing relationship with Sheela Foam and signals a wider push by the agency into integrated communications mandates across both Indian and international markets.
It is a familiar pattern in the current agency market: independents winning consolidated regional briefs by pitching a single accountable team rather than a network of specialist units. For clients expanding into a new geography with limited local marketing headcount, a one-throat-to-choke model reduces coordination overhead — provided the agency actually has depth in each discipline.
What Indian marketers can take from this
Indian consumer brands going into the Gulf face a market that looks familiar but behaves differently. A few practical takeaways from how this brief is structured:
- Pick anchor markets, not the whole region. Starting with the UAE and Saudi Arabia rather than all of MENA gives you learnings you can actually apply before scaling.
- Sequence brand and performance together. In a considered category, pure performance spend hits a ceiling fast when nobody recognises the name.
- Treat retail as a media channel. Shopper marketing is not an afterthought in categories where the final decision happens in-store.
- Insist on local on-ground presence. Remote management of a Gulf market rarely survives contact with local retail and regulatory realities.
For Sheela Foam, the test will be whether Sleepwell and Kurl-on — names with deep recall in India — can build equivalent trust in markets where they are still challengers against established regional and international players.
Source: MediaNews4U
