11
BRANDS
Built · shaped · repositioned
Who's behind it
I'm Zainab Salah.
I started writing captions. Now I decide what a brand says before anyone writes a word.
Most briefs arrive as a list of things to post. My job is to find the one thing the brand is actually saying — then make a year of content say it without repeating itself once.
Eleven brands, from real estate and logistics to baby care, across Egypt and the Gulf. I set the direction in Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic and English, because the hook that lands in Cairo is not the hook that lands in Dubai.
And I have worked all three sides of the brief — taking one at an agency, writing one in-house, and paying for one myself. Zedé Glow is mine. I wrote it, built the shop and bought the traffic, so I know what a piece of content costs before I ask anyone to make it.
- Agency · in-house · product
- Egypt & UAE
- 11 brands
- 7 industries
- 4 years
AI tools
Platforms
Software
- Ps
- Ai
Where the work happened
THREE SEATS.One brief.
Agency, in-house, and a brand I own. Most content people spend a whole career inside one of the three. What separates them is who writes the brief and who pays when it is wrong — and I have sat in all three seats.
Eleven brands · seven industries · Egypt & the UAE
Reels Marketing
Agency · UAE
The brief arrives written.
My job is what it left out.
Seven brands
Open the agency side-
SFI Properties
Real estate · Dubai
Open
-
Engine Court
Automotive · Sharjah
Open
-
Cady Royal
Medical centre · UAE
See the work
-
Reels Marketing
The agency itself · UAE
See the work
-
GPS
Vehicle tracking · UAE
See the work
-
Gulf Express
Logistics · UAE
See the work
-
Dr. Makkiya
Plastic surgery · Dubai
See the work
Semak
In-house · Egypt
Nobody hands me a brief.
I write it.
Three brands
Open the brand sideOn my own
Product & my own brand
I write the brief,
then pay for it.
Two — one in the UAE, one in Egypt
Open the product sideMarket 01 of 02
United Arab Emirates
Six brands · agency side at Reels Marketing · 01—07
Gulf market, Gulf Arabic, and clients who measure in bookings. I receive the brief and execute it — across real estate, automotive, medical, tracking and logistics.
SFI Properties
Content direction
Reels Marketing Agency
01 / 11
01 / The Proof
SFI
Properties
My role
Content direction · Format testing · Scripting · Tone of voice
Most brands don't have a content problem.They have a decision problem.
The Situation
The feed only sold projects: property, price, call. At 1,100 followers, it gave people no reason to stay unless they were ready to buy.
The Decision
People don't follow inventory.
They follow people.
I moved founder Ahmed Assi to the front, speaking from experience rather than inventory. Hooks, formats and CTAs were then tested around that voice.
Selling stayed. It stopped being the only reason to watch.
The Work
6 selected pieces · 3 formats
Swipe to explore
01
/ 06
The Result
- 506,206
- Organic views
in 30 days - 248,477
- Accounts
reached - 73.6%
- From people who
didn't follow the account - 0%
- From paid
distribution
Followers went from 1,100 to 2,000 — and the ones who arrived came for the person, not the listing.
Reels · SFI Properties
Eight reels built on the founder rather than the listing — each one earns the watch before it asks for anything.
Engine Court
Automotive · Sharjah · Reels Marketing
02 / 11
02 / Content + workflow
Engine Court
Two parts of the same content job.
My role
Content direction · Arabic copy · Hooks & formats · Production workflow
Content position · Production workflow
Engine
Court
The setup
Content
needs a system.
Open either part.
& formats. View content case
Track 02
Production flow& approvals. View workflow case
Reels · Engine Court
Four reels from the content track — a question drivers actually ask, answered before anything is sold.
03 · Reels Marketing
Cady Royal
A medical centre with branches in Dubai, Fujairah and Al Ain. The account has to turn a scroll into a booked appointment, in a category where people are too shy to ask the question out loud.
The account
- Planned the feed around three reasons to post — explain a treatment, answer a worry, or carry an offer with a real date — so it is never just a run of discounts.
- Wrote every hook the way a patient thinks — the symptom first, the treatment second, so a post answers the worry before it names a service.
- Ended every post on one action — the branch to call — in the same place each time.
The Work
Six pieces · selected from the feed
04 · Reels Marketing
GPS
Vehicle tracking for the Syrian market, sold to two very different people from one account: the man with a single car, and the company running a fleet.
The account
- Split the plan into two tracks, individual driver and fleet, so every post knows which of them it is talking to.
- Wrote each hook around a fear or a job rather than the device — the driver who takes the long road alone, the fleet moving food and medicine that cannot sit in the heat.
- Kept the specs short and in plain Arabic; the model number is there for whoever wants it, never in the headline.
The Work
Six pieces · selected from the feed
05 · Reels Marketing
Gulf Express
A Dubai freight company talking to other businesses — a hard audience to hold, because nobody follows logistics for entertainment.
The account
- Built the plan around one worry per post — delay, cost, tracking, damage — instead of listing services.
- Wrote headlines to be read in two seconds at a red light — one promise each, the time or the safe pair of hands, never both at once.
- Kept the Arabic in Gulf register and the ask to a single line, the same one every time.
The Work
Four pieces · selected from the feed
06 · Reels Marketing
Dr. Makkiya
A plastic surgeon in Jumeirah, Dubai. The account has to earn trust long before it books a consultation, in a field where people research quietly and ask nothing.
The account
- Planned an education-first feed — pre-op and recovery advice, and the awareness days — so the account is useful before it sells.
- Wrote the posts as answers to what people actually search — how long recovery really takes, what the first week feels like — so the question itself becomes the headline.
- Turned each answer into numbered steps a patient can act on, and kept every claim inside what a doctor is allowed to say.
The Work
Three pieces · selected from the feed
07 · The agency itself
Reels Marketing
The agency behind the six brands above. Alongside its clients I ran its own page — the content plan and the account management. An agency’s own feed is the one nobody has time for, and the one that has to sell the agency.
Reels · Reels Marketing
Five reels from the agency’s own account — short-form ideas written and scheduled as part of one content plan.
Designs · Reels Marketing
Eighteen static designs from the agency’s own content system — brand education, positioning, process and proof.
Market 02 of 02
Egypt
Four brands · Egypt · 08—11
Egyptian Arabic, a category that repeats itself, and no agency across the table to hand the strategy question to. Three brands in-house at Semak — and one that is mine outright.
Penduline Baby
Baby care · Egypt · Semak
08 / 11
08 / The Proof
Penduline
Baby
Baby care · Egypt · Semak (in-house)
Eight campaigns in eighteen months, and not one of them repeats another.
They still read as one brand.
My role
Brand narrative · Audience strategy · Monthly narrative direction · Character strategy · Campaign concepts · Influencer & UGC scripting
The Situation
In baby care, trust comes before the product.
First-time mothers are deciding who to trust while the category repeats the same words: gentle, safe, from day one. Penduline needed a reason to matter between product announcements.
The Decision
Stop publishing a calendar.
Start telling a story.
- 01One constant
Nine different worlds, one cue running through all of them — a post is recognised before a word is read.
- 02One story per month
Posts became chapters, not a list of things to say.
- 03Peno becomes an actor
The character demonstrates the product instead of decorating it.
- 04Replace claims with proof
Make the mother verify the label herself.
Character strategy
A character buys consistency once.
Then spends it on range.
Campaign · الأأمن بالدليل
Don’t tell her it’s safe.
Hand her the evidence.
A magnifying glass enlarges Piroctone olamine on the real bottle. A competition then asks mothers to find the ingredient themselves — turning the label into proof.
The account
Where the work
actually lived.
3,328 posts and 179K followers. Eighteen months of that feed is what this case is drawn from.
The Work
Eight campaigns.
One recognisable brand.
- 8
- Campaigns
- 103
- Pieces in the current archive
- 4
- Campaign films
- 10
- Reels
Campaign films
The worlds in motion.
Selected Reels · excerpts
The Result
Eighteen months.
One running story.
What is visible here is the structure: eight campaigns that never repeat, held together by one character and one running story.
Reels · Penduline Baby
A caption gets a second read; a reel gets three seconds. The hook, the beat it turns on, and the single ask at the end.
All reels on Instagram
09 · Semak
Toffee Kids
An Egyptian kids’ hair and body care brand, where the mother pays and the child decides. Every post has to work on both at once.
The account
- Planned the year around moments the family already has — back to school, Ramadan, the beach — so there is a reason to post that isn’t the product.
- Wrote in kids’ Egyptian Arabic and cast the products as characters the child takes sides with, so the post is a story before it is a shelf.
- Gave the mother her own line inside the same post — value, safety, what is in it — so one piece speaks to two people.
The Work
Twelve pieces · selected from the feed
Reels · Toffee Kids
Four reels in kids’ Egyptian Arabic — the product plays a character the child takes sides with, and the mother still gets her line.
10 · Semak
Oral
Penduline’s oral care and air freshener line. It has no account of its own: it runs on the Penduline feed, which is the profile shown here.
The account
- Wrote each piece around one moment in a child’s day — brushing before school, the smell of the classroom, fresh breath at break.
- Framed it as a habit rather than a product — the child who starts the day right, not the tube that does it.
- Kept one ask on every piece, and only one: order now.
The Work
Five pieces · selected from the feed
11 · Built by me
Zedé Glow
This one is mine. Not a client, not an account I was put on — a skincare brand I own. Nobody briefs me, nobody signs off on me, and there is nobody else to carry it. Every decision on this page is one I made and one I paid for.
My role
Brand owner · Positioning · Content plan · Copywriting · Design · AI-generated UGC · Paid ads · The Shopify store
Where it started
I didn’t want to learn the rest of it from a brief.
I wanted to learn it by owning it.
I had spent years deciding what other people’s brands should say. The parts I had never touched were the ones that decide whether a brand actually survives — the shop, the ad account, the price of getting one person to click. So I built a brand of my own to find out.
Zedé Glow started as a way to learn something new. It ended up as a brand that ships.
How it was built
Five moves,
in this order.
Nothing here was outsourced, and nothing happened at once. This is the sequence the brand was actually built in.
-
01
The pages
The accounts came first — name, look, bio, the handle. The brand had to exist somewhere before it existed as a shop, so there was an audience waiting when there was finally something to buy.
-
02
The content
Then the feed. I wrote and designed every post on the same rule I use for clients: one concern, one product, one outcome — in the Egyptian Arabic a woman actually uses about her own skin, not the Arabic a skincare label is written in.
-
03
The ads
Then paid. Writing for an audience that never asked to see you is a different craft: you have about a second, the hook has to carry the offer, and every weak line has a number attached to it. This is where I learned what content costs.
-
04
The store
Then the shop itself. I designed the Shopify store — with AI tooling instead of a developer — and laid it out around the content plan rather than the product list: the concerns, the bundles, the offers, in the order the feed had already taught people to want them.
-
05
Live
And then it opened. zedeglow.com — a brand out in the open, running on content I wrote, in a shop I built, to an audience I brought.
What owning it changed
Once you write the caption, buy the traffic and build the page it lands on,
you stop treating them as three jobs.
That is what this brand gave me, and it is the reason the direction I give on the other nine is sharper than it was. I now ask what a piece of content is supposed to cost before I ask what it is supposed to say.
The shop
zedeglow.com
Live — built with AI tooling
The shop
- Wrote and designed every post — the one place on this site where the layout is mine as well as the words.
- Made the UGC videos with AI instead of a shoot, so a small brand could still show a face, a hand and a routine.
- Designed the Shopify store and ran the offers, the bundles and the concern pages off the same content plan.
Brand owner · content · design · AI video · ads · the store
The Work
Five pieces · selected from the feed
Contact
Get in
touch.
The next brief can start here. Open to senior content roles in the Gulf.
Based in Cairo, Egypt Working across Egypt and the Gulf
Start a
conversation.
Tell me the brand and the problem. I’ll come back with the angle before I come back with a price.
