One Suitcase: The Journey Behind Dahab Perfumes

People see the shop. This is the story they don’t see.

In 1999, Sufian left Sharjah for London as a student, with one suitcase and no idea what life would actually become. He left behind his parents, his friends, everything familiar, and for the first time he was completely on his own. More than twenty five years of restarts, chapters and quiet decisions followed, and they eventually led to Dahab Perfumes, the shop you might already know.

One Suitcase, No Plan

Not long after arriving, Sufian started working door to door, selling mobile phones, alarms and credit cards. Long days, a lot of doors closed in his face, and a lesson in resilience no classroom could teach. It was there that he met his wife. They were 20 and 19. They got married, and it wasn’t long before their first son was on the way, born in 2003, with no home, no money and no stability yet, just each other.

Budgens and a Front Door of Their Own

To support the young family, Sufian took a job at Budgens supermarket, cleaning shelves, mopping floors, stacking boxes, shift after shift. It wasn’t glamorous, but it built the discipline that would carry through everything that came after. Eventually the family got the keys to a council flat of their own, a front door they could lock. Two more sons followed, in 2007 and 2011, three boys in total, each arriving in a different chapter of the story.

Walking Away Before The 2008 Crash

Sufian later moved into mortgages, working in a role most people would have held onto. But something didn’t feel right, so he walked away, just before the 2008 financial crisis hit. At the time it made no sense to anyone around him. Looking back, it’s one of the earliest examples of a pattern that repeats through the whole story: walking away from something stable, without a clear plan for what came next, simply because staying felt wrong.

From A Night Switchboard To London’s Biggest Hotels

Sufian’s journey into luxury started on a night shift switchboard at Hilton London Metropole, before he rose to Assistant Night Manager. From there he became Night Manager at the Waldorf Hilton, around the same time his wife started her first business, Islamic calligraphy, from home. Then came the Shangri-La at The Shard, one of London’s tallest buildings, where he was promoted to Duty Manager, while his wife moved into modest fashion and hijabs. Along the way, Sufian crossed paths with guests including Lewis Hamilton, members of Blue, Cat Stevens, Jérôme Boateng, Riyad Mahrez, Samuel L. Jackson, Colin Farrell and Benedict Cumberbatch. But the real lesson was never about fame. It was professionalism: the same standard, whoever is standing in front of you, whether it’s a quiet Tuesday morning or the busiest night of the year.

A Master’s Earned On Night Shifts

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, Sufian completed a Master’s in Hospitality through Cornell University, while still working full time nights, studying on breaks and after shifts when most people were just waking up. He graduated with honours. Discipline, not talent or luck, was the foundation: just showing up, again and again, even on the nights he didn’t want to.

Two Restarts In 2017

In 2017, Sufian left hospitality and tried something new. It didn’t work, and one month later he walked away from that too. It isn’t an easy thing to admit, walking away twice in the space of a year. But sometimes life resets you, not because you’ve failed, but because the next chapter hasn’t started yet.

One Table, One Market, One Beginning

Then it started with trust. A family friend gave Sufian Arabian perfumes to sell first and pay for later, no contract, no pressure, just trust that he’d come back and pay what he owed. That trust became Dahab Perfumes in 2018: one table, one market, one beginning, starting at Dagenham Market and not long after at Bovingdon Market too. From that very first day, Sufian’s wife was standing right there beside him, at every single market, every single day, as an equal partner rather than someone supporting from the side, while also doing the school runs and raising their three sons throughout. By the time COVID hit, the two of them had become the first, and for a long while the only, perfumers from Dubai trading at either market.

Rebuilding After COVID

Then COVID shut everything down. Markets closed, and years of work disappeared almost overnight. But giving up was never really an option, so they rebuilt together, slowly and patiently, one step at a time, until there was something to rebuild onto.

Genuinely From Dubai

Around that same time, Arabian perfumes started going properly viral on social media, and new sellers began appearing everywhere. Sufian sees that as a good thing overall, more people curious about this kind of perfumery is good for everyone. But it does mean their own story now sits a little differently in the middle of it all. Sufian was born in the United Arab Emirates, and Dagenham and Bovingdon weren’t a trend for him and his wife. They were where the two of them started, years before any of this was popular, standing at a table and learning it properly, one customer at a time, long before it had a hashtag.

Opening The Shop

Eventually, they opened their first Dahab Perfumes store, in Grays. Sufian’s wife has been part of every single stage of it, building alongside it the same as she always has, from calligraphy at a kitchen table to standing in the shop today. Their sons are grown now, or nearly: the eldest in his final year studying medicine at UCL, the second studying pharmacology, and the youngest still finishing school. As Sufian puts it, this shop isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of everything next.

The shop didn’t create this story. The story created the shop. Watch the full episode of The Scent Room with Sufian below for the complete journey, told entirely to camera, in his own words.