Arab Merchandise
Retail group — Al-Makhzangy and Baba El-Tawfir
2019 — PresentCareer path
- Administration and accounts — 2019
- Operations Manager — since October 2021
The story
When the previous group split up in 2019, I left with one of its partners to build a new company from zero: Arab Merchandise, which trades under Al-Makhzangy and Baba El-Tawfir. There was no system, so I built one — a complete administrative system in Excel with VBA and forms, hosted on Drive, carrying every warehouse and branch movement. I ran administration and accounts on it.
I served as a reserve officer between 2019 and 2021. Once I joined my unit I kept working remotely, maintaining the system I had built and handling the group's data analysis, and in October 2021 I returned full time as Operations Manager.
The group had grown to 35 branches with a lot of improvisation in between. We restructured the company and moved the whole operation onto Miracle ERP. In 2022 we needed more than that system could give, so I learned Odoo, built the group's system from A to Z myself, and trained the staff to work on it — which is where my Odoo career started.
Key results
- Built the Excel VBA system the company ran on from day one
- Restructuring of a group that had grown to 35 branches
- Miracle ERP rolled out across the whole group
- Odoo system built in-house and staff trained on it
Experience letters
Related retail experience
99.99Operations Consultant · 2023 · 6 months
- Operations Consultant
A six-month consulting engagement with a footwear trading company, taken on alongside my work at Arab Merchandise, to improve how the business ran day to day.
- Improved the company's day-to-day operations in six months
Shoes ClubFrom sales associate to area and online sales manager · 2015 — 2019
- Sales associate — Tanta branch
- Deputy branch manager
- Branch manager
- Area manager — 5 branches
- Warehouse manager
- All branches — operations and stock
- Accounts
- Online sales manager — 2 years
I started here in 2015, straight after secondary school, as a sales associate in the Tanta branch of New Born, a ready-made clothing company whose stores traded as Fifty Five. Six months later I was deputy manager of that branch, two months after that its manager, and then area manager responsible for five branches — stock counts, sales and HR, all of it.
New partners came in and the group became Shoes Club. I moved to run the warehouses for three months, then came back to branch management, this time over all the branches, and my work shifted from selling to inventory and administration. After a two-month spell in accounting, I took over the group's online sales.
I ran that department for about two years — the Facebook store, Jumia, Souq and Noon — and it was the most successful thing I did there. By then I had worked in every part of the company, from the warehouse to the accounts. In 2019 the partnership dissolved and the company was split.
- Sales associate to area manager of 5 branches in under two years
- Ran warehouses, branches, accounts and online sales
- Built the online sales channel on Jumia, Souq and Noon
