NET-A-PORTER
Launching NET-A-PORTER across the GCC was a significant commercial opportunity. The under-25 demographic makes up 50% of the population across the region, a young, high-spending audience that luxury e-commerce had largely underserved.
This wasn't a translation project. The experience needed to be locally meaningful: Arabic-language interfaces, regionally relevant content, and local brand curation sitting alongside the global catalogue.
I built a lightweight RTL component library to support the launch. Not being an Arabic speaker, I needed to understand the language's typographic conventions before designing anything. Arabic doesn't use bold or italic for emphasis. Brand names retain their Latin spelling and continue to read left-to-right within an RTL context. Search had to handle both Arabic and Western character input simultaneously, since most brand names remained in English.
For typography, Amiri replaced Chronicle for editorial text. Akkurat AR, the Arabic companion to Akkurat already used on the English site, carried the sans-serif weight, keeping both experiences feeling part of the same brand.
NET-A-PORTER completed its full platform migration across all countries in February 2021, with the Middle East launch covering six markets:
Bahrain · Kuwait · Oman · Qatar · Saudi Arabia · United Arab Emirates