At A Glance

A trained chemist, Zohaib Ahmad has taken his experience working in the pharmaceutical and beauty industries and used it to build Zousz into a luxury brand of men’s grooming products. His expertise was essential in product development, but as you read about how he started his company from scratch, you’ll see how the customer experience has served as a north star in developing  everything from the company’s return policy to its distinctive and award-winning packaging.

Who is Zohaib?

Meet Zohaib Ahmad, Founder and CEO of Zousz

About Zousz

As Zohaib began researching men’s grooming products, he concluded that scent-based men’s grooming products were either overpriced or lacked quality. He set out to develop a luxury product that could be sold without the inflated price tag. Zousz offered a beard balm and beard oil at launch, but the catalog has expanded to include hair care and face wash. The company ships worldwide, but the majority of orders come from the UK with about 30 percent going to the U.S.

Zohaib’s Journey

Zohaib is a chemist whose work experience includes corporate heavyweights like 3M and GE. He also has extensive experience in quality assurance. Personally, he was interested in fashion design and became intrigued with the growing category of men’s grooming products, which led to him founding Zousz in 2016. He started by testing more than 100 different men’s grooming products, logging the ingredients and taking extensive notes on what he liked and what he didn’t. He took the same approach with packaging only this time, he looked beyond men’s grooming to other products like perfume and even high-end food items to look at the way brands used packaging to give their product a premium feel. With Zousz, Zohaib created what he describes as a “sensorial experience” for the customer in everything from the signature black oud scent to the thick gift-worthy boxes to the vegan-friendly ingredients he uses whenever possible.

Zousz’s team structure

For the first six years, Zohaib was not only running the company himself, but he did that while holding another full-time job. He’s been able to focus on Zousz since April 2022. In addition to a committed core of full-time employees, Zousz works with anywhere from 10 to 15 people who handle tasks that range from marketing to manufacturing and design.

Preserving positive feelings

Zousz first reached customers via Amazon, and Zohaib says that provided a template for the customer-experience philosophy. “We don't want any sort of negative experience or negative reviews,” he says, “If the person isn't happy with the product, we will refund you and you can keep it. We always want to serve the customer.”

The ins and outs of ads

Zohaib has paid influencers to market Zousz products, but he’s found it more successful to use his customer testimonials as social-media proof whether that’s publicizing reviews or incorporating user-generated content into digital advertising. ”What's worked for us is getting that confirmation from our customers that our products are great,” Zohaib says. “That gives organic growth and we try and leverage that.” Effective advertising requires volume, Zohaib says, and the only way to find out which ads work is to test them. “Everyone I speak to who's done well on ads, they say it's one out of every 50 ads is going to work,” he says. “The rest, some will do OK, and most of them won't work.”

‍Applications for AI‍

Zohaib cites ChatGPT as a tool that he uses frequently, asking it to analyze everything from last month’s financial reports to current spending patterns. He’s not using it externally, however. No AI agents or other automation of customer care as there are some customers who would prefer to talk to a human. Additionally, the nature of the products that Zousz offers could pose a challenge for any AI application. “We get customers asking about the difference between products,” Zohaib says, “How they smell and how they feel and, you know, when to use them and the order you should use them in. I think the human person can give a better answer for that scenario.”

Present-day strengths‍

Packaging was something Zohaib focused on early in the company’s history, seeking a premium feel in everything from the thickness of the boxes to the logo itself. One direct benefit of this emphasis can be seen in sales around not just Christmas, but also Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day and Ramadan. “Really any gifting period is good for us,” Zohaib says, “because a lot of people buy our products as gifts.” That puts a premium on planning and managing the supply chain to make sure there’s a ready supply for the oncoming demand. “We have different suppliers for different parts of the product,” Zohaib says, “the box, the bottle, the formulation. We have to work with so many different suppliers and we have to plan all of that and we need to have stock in advance.”

Tech stack

Gorgias

Advice to other entrepreneurs

Zohaib says the first thing he’d test before launching a product isn’t about the product at all, but rather the market. He’d first want to test the level of potential interest. “I'd create a landing page,” Zohaib says, “Or do a mock-up. It's an easier way to gauge if you have interest in the product, and if you have people who sign up to your mailing list, or whatever your idea is.” If you’re set on making the product first, Zohaib advises manufacturing the smallest possible batch even if it doubles or triples the normal unit price. “You’re limiting the risk,” he says, “because you're verifying, you're validating the idea or the product and if people like it. Then you can just grow from there. The profitability and all that can come later. At the start you just want to validate the idea.”