Home Business News The Female Founder Innovating Circular Luxury with a New UAE-Based App

The Female Founder Innovating Circular Luxury with a New UAE-Based App

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Supporting circular luxury, the mobile app offers a trust-led platform for the community to buy, sell and gift preloved pieces.

Shaima Sibtain, Founder and CEO of LUVED

Meet Shaima Sibtain, Founder and CEO of LUVED, whose journey spans multiple industries from construction and real estate to music to tech and design. LUVED is a UAE-based, mobile-first platform redefining circular luxury. Designed as an easy-to-use, trust-led app, it is a curated peer-to-peer marketplace where premium and everyday preloved fashion and lifestyle pieces can be bought, sold and gifted, combining the ease of a modern app with trust and convenience.

With over a decade of entrepreneurial, commercial and business leadership experience spanning technology, real estate, SME development, and the creative industries, Shaima brings a uniquely multifaceted perspective to building modern consumer ventures that are rooted in both innovation and purpose.

A serial entrepreneur by nature, Shaima launched her first business at just 21 years old when she co-founded a London-based serviced office company and coworking space created to support and empower young entrepreneurs, startups and SMEs through dynamic spaces that inspire collaboration and growth.

She further strengthened her business acumen by serving as a director within her family’s long-established construction and real estate business for over five years, where she was involved in managing medium-scale projects, overseeing contractors and ensuring operational efficiency.

Alongside her entrepreneurial ventures, Shaima also built a parallel career in the music industry as a singer-songwriter under her own label M Dynasty Records that she launched when she was 23, merging her love for singing and songwriting. She went on to work with world-renowned artists, developed creative direction and gained first-hand experience in the global entertainment industry.

She earned Top 5 chart positions through her label and media recognition for her achievements as a self-funded recording artist and independent businesswoman across both creative and commercial industries. This journey not only showcased her creative versatility, but also sharpened her understanding of personal branding, audience engagement, and storytelling.

Academically, Shaima holds a First-Class degree in Accounting and Finance from Bayes Business School, London, and most recently, she completed the Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy programme at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan Executive Education, equipping her with a strong financial expertise and a forward-thinking approach to building technology-led consumer platforms, enabling her to build ventures that are agile, intelligent, and built for modern consumer demands.

After relocating from London to Dubai, Shaima identified a clear gap in the UAE’s preloved and resale market. While consumer appetite for conscious shopping, circular living, and luxury resale was rapidly growing, the overall experience remained fragmented, inconsistent, and lacking the trust, convenience, and pace expected by today’s users. Recognising the opportunity to elevate this category, she decided to build a business in a new market and founded LUVED, with the vision of creating a platform that would bring everything together in one place for the community, making it simple to discover, circulate and re-love pieces that are barely used, in a way that feels effortless and secure.

More than a traditional marketplace, LUVED aims to build a trust-led community built around taste, curation and connection, where users know what they’re buying is exactly what they’ll receive, sellers are assured their payments are secure, and deliveries happen smoothly from start to finish.

Under her leadership, LUVED is built as a seamless, AI-powered platform combining smart automation, authentication and integrated logistics to create a more trusted and effortless online marketplace, while also aligning with the UAE’s growing focus on circular economy and reshaping customer perceptions around resale, redefining it as something practical and aspirational. As the Founder and CEO, Shaima oversees the company’s long-term business vision, platform development, strategic partnerships, investor relations, brand direction, and customer experience innovation.

Driven by a long-term vision to build the region’s most trusted platform for preloved shopping and resale, Shaima is focused on building a brand that champions smarter consumption habits, transforming how people think about ownership, value and longevity in a way that feels modern, premium and accessible. Her aim is to turn wardrobe and home clear-outs into something more meaningful and make circular luxury a part of everyday life for a new generation of shoppers, empowering the community to shop, sell, and gift more intentionally.

About LUVED:

Founded in 2026, LUVED is a UAE-based mobile-first platform that redefines circular luxury. It is a peer-to-peer online marketplace where curated, preloved fashion and lifestyle pieces are bought, sold and given a second life, bringing an effortless and secure way to pass things on. LUVED offers a carefully curated edit of luxury and everyday pieces across men, women and children’s categories with more categories coming soon.  The app allows sellers to keep 100% of every sale with zero commission, whereas buyers can benefit from secure payments, authentication and buyer protection. Enhancing the experience further, LUVED offers AI-powered autofill and dynamic pricing suggestions, allowing users to create product listings in as little as five seconds from a minimum of three photos. Soon, the app will also introduce “Luvbot”, an intelligent in-app assistant designed to make the experience even smarter and more seamless through personalized support, smart selling insights, and smart real-time recommendations and guidance based on marketplace demand, bringing together technology, trust and community in one intuitive experience. Features include swipe-based discovery, in-app chat (both English and Arabic), story feature to view real-time drops and door-to-door delivery. Through its Luved & Gifted feature, LUVED also enables users to give away items within the platform, extending product life and reinforcing a more conscious way to shop. LUVED is available on the App Store and coming soon to Google Play.