By Anand Holla


Name: Mohammed Salim Ansari
Nationality: Nepali

What do you sell?
Perfumes, watches, pens, cufflinks, women’s cosmetics, women’s fashion accessories, and even children’s toys. Tourists love our perfumes. Be it Pakistanis or Nepalis, everybody likes to try the Arabian oud. However, we stock only the lighter ouds. Arabs, for instance, prefer to use full-bodied, dark oud marked by a strong aroma. We don’t have any of those.

What are your shop’s specialties?
I would say perfumes and toys. We import our perfumes from UAE and we have an interesting range. Since there are enough shops selling French perfumes, our focus is on sweet-smelling, light ouds. Basically, oud (or Agarwood) is a dark resin formed by a fungus that grows on specific kinds of trees (Aquilaria and Gyrinops). It is from these woods that the oud perfume is extracted.

Where do you source your goods from?
Almost all our products come from UAE, and all our perfumes, too. None of these perfumes are fake. It was said that some shops around here were indulging in selling fake products, a couple of years ago. But the authorities have ensured that everybody toes the line. In Souq Waqif, inspection has become very strict. Every day, 10-15 shops are inspected.

How do you try and set yourself apart from other shops?
From fragrant oils (ittar) to sweet-smelling perfumes, we stock everything that our customers come looking for. Jasmine, apple and strawberry flavours, for instance, are favourites with women.

Do you face any kind of problems running this shop?
Never. Security, especially, is top-notch here. Even when we go to read namaaz and pray, we just pull down the shop curtains and go.
Who are your customers?
Pakistanis, Indians and Sri Lankans form the bulk of our customers. I find that they are never in a mood to argue or fight, and are ready to settle at one price. Most of our customers are Pakistanis. When they return home for holidays, they take back a lot of gifts for their families and friends. They are nice to talk to and are good customers too. They don’t spend too much time rifling through various options or haggling about prices.

What kind of customers do you find annoying?
We don’t try and convince customers who aren’t aware of good quality because it becomes tough to explain them the merits of a product when they have made up their mind to not understand it. Also, some customers take too much time to decide.

What is the best thing about Souq Waqif?
The variety of tourists that you can find here is something you perhaps can’t find anywhere else in Qatar. From Moroccans to Armenians, people across the globe drop by. The only ones to be rarely seen are perhaps the Chinese or the Koreans. During Hajj, for instance, Saudi tourists come by to do a lot of shopping. If there’s a marriage ceremony in the offing, they take huge quantities of perfumes as gifts.

If it wasn’t for this job, what would you have been doing?
In Qatar, I would have been a tourist guide in Souq Waqif. If I was home in Kathmandu, I would have run a clothes store.



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