Manukora is a New Zealand Mānuka honey brand known for high-quality product and serious global export capability. It's a business built on provenance, with the distribution reach to take that story well beyond New Zealand.
As part of a wider global expansion strategy, Manukora identified the MENA region as a high-potential market and chose the UAE as the entry point – attractive for its large expat population and strong English-language coverage. The objective was a properly localised UAE storefront that could serve the market, act as a test ground for the region, and launch lean enough to prove the opportunity before larger investment followed.
Three questions had to be settled before any build began.
First, platform: Shopify Markets or a Shopify Plus expansion store – a decision that would shape cost, flexibility and speed for years.
Second, localisation: English is widely spoken in the UAE, but the site still needed Arabic, and Arabic brings right-to-left requirements that touch every template rather than sitting neatly in a translation layer.
Third, cost: this was a market test, so launching lean wasn't a preference, it was the brief.
Atlas scoped both platform options honestly rather than defaulting to the larger build. Shopify Markets looked leaner on paper, but its out-of-the-box feature set wouldn't cover what the UAE launch required, and the custom development needed to close that gap would have undone the cost objective entirely. A Shopify Plus expansion store proved the best approach. From there the principle was reuse over rebuild: the same base theme as the global site for brand consistency and speed, with apps and features stripped back to what this market genuinely needed.
The UAE site was developed on the global base theme, running a deliberately leaner app and feature set – with those efficiencies passed back to the client. Arabic content was integrated with full right-to-left support, and custom server-side and client-side tracking was implemented to capture market-specific profile properties. A local third-party logistics provider was integrated to handle regional fulfilment.
Manukora now has a localised UAE site aligned with its global brand, straightforward to manage and update across the UAE and the wider region. It launched on time and within budget, and now serves as the test ground for MENA – with Saudi Arabia and beyond next.
