How Whites Built an Award-Winning Omnichannel Loyalty Program

About Whites: Saudi Arabia's Largest Beauty and Wellness Retail Chain

130+ branches across 20+ Saudi cities, and a Forbes ranking as the Kingdom's most innovative retail concept

Whites is the first and largest beauty, wellness and lifestyle retail chain in Saudi Arabia. Operated by Global Investment Co. (GHC), it has built a category of its own: part premium beauty destination, part pharmacy, part lifestyle store.

What makes Whites unusual is the width of the basket. One customer might buy luxury makeup, a prescription medicine, a vitamin supplement and a baby product in a single visit, across categories with completely different margins, regulations and repurchase cycles. The store experience matches that ambition, with makeup artists, skin advisors, e-prescription services and interactive skincare hotspots on the floor.

Whites runs a genuinely omnichannel operation:

• Physical retail: 130+ branches across 20+ cities, with in-store beauty advisors and POS checkout
• E-commerce: A web storefront and native iOS and Android apps built on Akinon
• Category breadth: Makeup, skincare, haircare, fragrance, personal care, mother and baby, vitamins, medicine and healthy foods
• Bilingual service: Arabic and English across every touchpoint

The Challenge

Whites had the estate, the app and years of purchase history. What it did not have was a way to connect them. Five problems stood between Whites and a loyalty program worth running.

1. The same shopper counted twice

A customer buying foundation from an advisor in a Riyadh branch and the same customer reordering it on the app that evening were, as far as the data was concerned, two different people. In beauty retail, discovery happens on the shop floor and repurchase happens on a phone. Splitting those two moments apart throws away the most valuable thing the business knows about its customers.

2. Four vendors, no shared customer record

The commerce platform, the POS estate, the CRM and the attribution tool each came from a different vendor. A loyalty layer had to read from and write to all four in real time, or it would simply become a fifth silo with its own incomplete picture.

3. Millions of orders of history about to be thrown away

Launching a program without the existing purchase data would have meant treating a five-year Whites customer exactly like a first-time walk-in on day one. That is the fastest way to lose the customers a loyalty program exists to protect.

4. Pharmacy rules and beauty rules do not mix

Medicines, insurance-funded Wasfaty sales, baby products and milk cannot be discounted or used to unlock rewards the way a lipstick can. Whites needed category-level control over what earns, what can be redeemed against and what is excluded outright, enforced by the platform rather than maintained by hand in a spreadsheet.

5. A program the marketing team could actually run

Whites did not want a program that needed an engineering ticket for every campaign. The marketing team had to be able to build cashback campaigns, seasonal challenges and tier benefits themselves, and see what each one did.

The Solution

Whites partnered with Gameball to build a single loyalty and engagement layer across the entire business, online and offline, plugged into the existing stack rather than replacing it.

The integration architecture was the whole point. Gameball connects to each system Whites already runs:

Inside Ana Whites

The program is called Ana Whites, and it lives in its own tab in the app rather than buried in a settings menu. Members register with a mobile number, which is also the identifier the POS uses, so the same person is recognised whichever way they shop.

The barcode that closes the loop

Every member's loyalty screen carries a scannable barcode. At the counter, a cashier scans it and the purchase lands on the same balance as an app order. That one detail is what makes the program omnichannel in practice rather than in a press release: the customer does nothing different, and the data arrives in one place.

Points that are readable before you buy

The earn rate is deliberately simple: 100 points for every 100 SAR spent, and 100 points is worth 1 SAR back. Every product page states the points the item will earn before the customer adds it to the basket, so the reward is visible at the moment of decision rather than discovered later in a statement.

A redemption ladder that rewards patience

Members turn points into fixed-value discount coupons inside the app. The ladder is priced so that saving for a larger coupon is worth more per point, which pushes members toward bigger, more considered redemptions instead of draining a balance on the smallest reward available.

The ladder continues into 100 SAR and 200 SAR coupons. Against the base rate of 100 points per SAR, a member who saves for the 60 SAR coupon gets roughly a third more value than one who cashes out at the first opportunity.

Three tiers, earned across every channel

Members move from Silver to Gold at 2,000 points, and to the top Whites tier at 6,000. Because earning is unified across the POS and digital, tier status reflects what a customer actually spends with the brand rather than what they happen to spend in one channel.

Key Features Implemented

A referral built into the loyalty screen

Refer and Win sits one tap from the balance. Members share a personal Whites link, the friend signs up and completes their first qualifying steps, and both sides are credited ten points. Completed and pending invites are visible in the app, so the member can see the reward coming rather than wondering whether it worked.

Because the referral code travels on a single Adjust dynamic link rather than one generated per member, the flow survives the app install and stays inside the plan Whites already pays for.

Years of history migrated, not discarded

Before launch, Whites and Gameball migrated the brand's historical order data into the loyalty platform: 4M+ orders processed, with the remainder loaded for segmentation and targeting. A customer who had been shopping at Whites for years walked into the new program already recognised, with their history available for segmentation from day one.

Why It Worked

1. Loyalty was treated as infrastructure, not a campaign

Whites did not bolt a points widget onto the app. The program was wired into the commerce platform, the POS, the CRM, the attribution tool and the data warehouse. That is more work up front, and it is the reason the program can now answer questions about customer behavior that a channel-specific program never could.

2. The omnichannel promise was actually delivered

Plenty of retailers call a loyalty program omnichannel when it means the app shows a barcode nobody scans. At Whites the barcode is scanned at the counter in 130+ branches, and that purchase hits the same balance, the same tier progress and the same campaign eligibility as an app order. For a category where discovery is physical and repurchase is digital, that is the difference between a program that works and a program that irritates people.

3. The history came with them

Migrating millions of historical orders meant the program launched with real segments instead of an empty database. Whites could target lapsed skincare buyers or high frequency makeup customers in week one rather than waiting two quarters to accumulate enough data to be useful.

4. Category control made pharmacy and beauty coexist

Exclusion logic and category-specific earning rules let Whites run aggressive beauty campaigns while keeping medicines, insurance sales and baby products outside the reward mechanics entirely. The rules are published in the app's own FAQ and enforced by the platform, so what the customer reads and what the system does are the same thing.

5. A weekly operating rhythm

Whites, Gameball and Akinon run a standing weekly sync covering integration, campaign configuration and reporting. Programs at this level of complexity are not launched and left alone, and treating this one as an operated system rather than a finished project is a large part of why it matured as fast as it did.

Recognized at the Whites Glow Awards

The Takeaway

A blueprint for omnichannel beauty and pharmacy retail

Whites shows what loyalty looks like when a retailer refuses to let the channel dictate the customer relationship. One program spans 130+ branches in 20+ cities, a web storefront and a mobile app, runs on a multi-vendor stack the brand already owned, and carries millions of orders of history into its segmentation.

For retailers in beauty, wellness and pharmacy looking at the same problem, the Whites approach offers a clear sequence:

1. Unify identity across POS and digital before designing a single reward

2. Integrate loyalty into the systems you already run rather than adding another silo

3. Bring your purchase history with you so the program launches with real segments

4. Build category-level rules so regulated and unregulated products can share one program

5. Price the redemption ladder so patience pays, and make the reward visible before the customer buys