The Tipping Point: We're everywhere!

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About eight years ago I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. It was probably the abridged version that I picked up, that I finished reading this tiny book while waiting for a friend in the old Kinokuniya bookshop in Dubai Mall. It basically said that businesses have a tipping point; that magical moment in time when something becomes a hit, viral, an epidemic and everyone’s just on it, consuming it, or wanting to be on it. The author gave a lot of examples from crime rates, and diseases, to commercial brands. I remember he cited the case of Vans shoes. After years that Vans was trying to make their brand a hit, the day finally came when everyone who WAS cool and everyone who WANTED to be cool was wearing Vans. At that time, I was in my fifth year running my first business Ahsant Premium Hotel Supplies, and I wondered, When will this tipping point come for Ahsant?

The year after I read this book, we won Best Middle East Hotel Supplies Partner in the Hotel Show. But it still wasn’t quite the tipping point I expected in terms of sales. The tipping point came for my corporate business in 2018, after I overhauled our entire visual branding – changing all our business collaterals and investing in a small photo studio and an SLR camera to take photos of our products. It was precisely the same business, the same people running Ahsant but our photos were just crisper, fonts more precise, and brand colors minimal. That was the tipping point for my first business.

So when I created the branding of Co Chocolat back in 2017, I wondered, when will the tipping point come for Co Chocolat? That question especially rose to the fore when there were lots of challenges, especially when we wanted to buy nuts or fruits, or pay for the printer and we only had 250 DHS in the bank. Cashflow is the burden of all organically-growing businesses.

Fast forward to February of 2023, exactly four years after we launched Co Chocolat online.. exactly four years that we have been spreading the word about healthy chocolates and empowering farmers, we SEEMED to have reached our tipping point… at least in marketing. 😊

We officially opened the first Co Chocolat Café on Feb. 21 and it was unbelievable how we were on TV, radio, newspaper, online magazines, and news outlets all in the same six weeks! Maybe, as Malcolm Gladwell said, it’s those incremental details that helped it all come together.

For whatever caused this fabulous moment in time, we say alhamdulillah. We are truly blessed for having a community that supports us and an investor in the form of Fahad bin Jumaa who saw our huge potential. Thank you to our corporate partners who believe in healthy chocolates and empowering farmers. When the word Sustainability has become an it-word thrown around because it’s trendy, YOU make the concept a breathing, living, concrete thing.

Cheers to these truly cool companies: Six Senses Zighy Bay in Oman, ITP Media, Stories by Zenaida, Ritz Carlton Al Wadi, Dolce & Gabbana, IWC, Bloomberg, Versace, Sharjah Ladies Club, RAK Fine Arts, and these wonderful people: Omar Shihab and Doaa Tahboub, Faiza Khan, Emma Pearson, Nitya of Vogue Arabia, Leslie of Reel Dunes and a looooot more people like YOU, reading this now, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU.

So here you go, go ahead and savor this moment with us. Click and enjoy!

Two Weeks before we officially opened, we were included in Gault and Millau’s feature of the 6 local chocolatiers to gift from this Valentine’s - Read more here