On Saturdays, Marwan Bin Yousuf Al Serkal had another working week to consider. In 2018, the banker was putting at least two hours a day into Carter & White alongside a full-time job that could consume twelve. Saturday belonged to the team: examine the previous seven days, then work out the next seven. Before the overseas boutiques, there was this appointment with the calendar.
It is an appealingly unromantic beginning for a luxury business. Fashion likes a dramatic entrance. Al Serkal had a day job, a growing collection of cotton products and a recurring meeting. The detail explains something about the founder who would take a Dubai label into European resort towns. His ambition was expansive; his early method fitted inside a week.
“Each day is a new challenge and a new opportunity.”
Marwan Al Serkal, 2018
Almost any entrepreneur could have supplied the sentence. The hours attached to it make it worth keeping. Building Carter & White meant finding room for another enterprise in a life already occupied by finance. The white cotton would have to earn its place.
A financier goes looking for fabric
Al Serkal came to clothing through business rather than a publicly documented apprenticeship in fashion design. His education includes business administration and finance at Suffolk University and an Executive MBA at what is now Bayes Business School. His banking career included HSBC and Credit Suisse. Investment, commercial relationships and the movement of capital were familiar territory before fabric became the product.
His broader business interests also extended beyond a wardrobe. He founded The Precious Yield Company, and his professional biographies record involvement with M Investment Capital Holdings and board roles at BH Mubasher and Al Islami Foods. These connections give his fashion venture a particular context: Carter & White emerged from someone accustomed to companies, counterparties and commercial decisions.
The material took him elsewhere. He travelled to Egypt in search of Giza cotton, investigating a supply chain that would become central to the label. Accounts of that preparation describe research into cotton varieties and visits to spinning and weaving mills. It was a rather literal way to establish what a luxury product should be made of. The starting point lay upstream of the shop window.
There is a useful business question inside that journey. A customer can read a label in seconds; a founder must decide what will justify it after months of use. Cotton offered Al Serkal a material around which to organise that decision. The company could introduce itself through something people already understood, then ask them to notice the difference in their hands.
First came the parcel
Carter & White launched in Dubai in 2016. Al Serkal later recalled that its initial online stock sold out in less than three months. His account paid attention to packaging, fabric and the feel of the product as parts of one experience. A small digital launch allowed the proposition to meet a customer before the business took on a shop.
He described the expansion in three stages: online sales from 2016, department stores from 2017, and its own stores from 2021. Galeries Lafayette and Le BHV featured in the middle stage. That sequence is revealing. The ambition for physical retail was present early, but the first transaction could arrive in a parcel. The lease came later.
A parcel has limitations as a theatre for luxury. It cannot offer a sales assistant, a fitting room or a conveniently flattering mirror. It can, however, make every small decision visible. How the garment is folded, how it feels, how the box opens: a young brand gets an unusually concentrated introduction. Al Serkal's attention to those details belonged to the commercial proposition from the beginning.
The mattress was part of the brief
By March 2018, the company had introduced a yacht bedding collection. Its team researched mattress dimensions across yacht brands and offered collections for owner, guest and standard suites. The bedding was designed in-house and manufactured in Italy. A business associated with undershirts and children's clothing was applying its material choices to an unusually specific domestic problem, afloat.
Al Serkal saw yacht owners as a niche whose requirements deserved closer attention. There is something pleasingly concrete about the decision. Even an expensive sheet must fit the bed. Researching mattress sizes put the offer in the world of specifications, where taste has to coexist with measurements. The collection debuted at the Dubai International Boat Show.
The company also developed a made-to-measure service for yacht and home linens. Customers could choose fabric and embroidery, including their initials. At the inaugural Abu Dhabi International Boat Show, Al Serkal spoke of the capital as an important market because of its boating community. Personalisation gave those conversations somewhere practical to go: a particular cabin, a particular finish, a particular order.
The same logic made a marina a sensible place to introduce the business. Someone shopping for a yacht already has an interest in the rooms inside it. Textiles can enter that discussion alongside other interior decisions. An unfamiliar label has a better opening when it can solve an immediate problem. Monograms are optional; the fit is rather less negotiable.
Good cotton gets invited aboard
In July 2020, Carter & White announced a partnership with superyacht builder Dynamiq. Clients could select linens to suit bed sizes, interior schemes and colour palettes through an online configurator. Jeremy Tutt of Dynamiq described having known Al Serkal and his team for several years before the formal agreement. The relationship had a history before it acquired an announcement.
For Al Serkal, the collaboration placed his products inside another company's design process. That is a different sale from persuading someone to try a shirt. The customer is already making decisions about a vessel; the textiles become one component in that undertaking. It gave a Dubai business another route to an international clientele without requiring a boutique in every port.
Hospitality supplied a parallel route. In 2020, Carter & White signed an exclusive linen supply agreement with Jannah Hotels & Resorts. The announced portfolio covered more than 600 rooms and 57 villas across Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah. A hotel order puts the same category of product to work repeatedly, across rooms, guests and housekeeping routines.
These agreements help explain the breadth of the enterprise Al Serkal was building. Clothes, yacht interiors and hotel linens ask different questions of a supplier. A founder moving between them needs to care about the product and the circumstances in which it will be used. The cotton story could open the conversation; delivery still had to finish it.
Taking Dubai through another front door
In April 2023, Carter & White announced an AED 40 million Series A funding round for regional and European expansion. Abdullah bin Saeed Al Naboodah chaired the board, alongside members including Hamad bin Jassim Al Darwish, Fayrouz Kapadia, Majid Al Ghaslan and Al Serkal. The next phase had capital and a group of people responsible for deciding how to use it.
Porto Cervo, in Sardinia, became the setting for the first international store that year. On LinkedIn, Al Serkal thanked the chairman and fellow board members for their support. The public gesture matters in a founder story: the photograph may centre one person, but the opening involved a network. He described Riyadh as the next new market in that announcement.
He continued returning to the boating audience, too. At the 2023 Dubai International Boat Show, he said it was Carter & White's fourth participation. The planned introductions included leather goods, yacht accessories and sandals for boat owners. The product range was changing while the setting remained useful. Familiar customers could meet an unfamiliar category without being asked to follow the brand somewhere entirely new.
Series A announced in April 2023, with regional and European retail expansion among its stated uses.
The team starts travelling in it
Another kind of journey appeared in February 2025. Carter & White became an official sponsor of Dubai Basketball, with bespoke clothing for players and staff travelling to and from home and away games that season. Al Serkal linked the agreement to teamwork and pride in the city. Clothes now had a role in the public presentation of a sporting organisation.
For a label built around everyday essentials and leisure, team travel is an interesting assignment. The clothing needs to belong to a group while being worn by individuals. The partnership also put the city's name and a Dubai-founded clothing business into the same frame. Al Serkal's repeated interest in taking local enterprise abroad had found another travelling companion.
His association with TAGMOA, the UAE and Middle East franchise and trademark services organisation, places him in a wider conversation about regional brands. Its profile identifies him as secretary-general and describes his support for Emirati and GCC creative businesses. The interest extends beyond a single shopfront to the commercial structures through which a brand can grow.
A larger company, measured in small things
By May 2026, Carter & White was reported to have 14 stores across the UAE, the wider Gulf and Europe. The ambition was 100 globally by 2030, with a possible public listing also discussed for that year. Those are plans. The existing stores are the work already carried into the world.
Al Serkal's language about a listing is recognisably that of someone who has worked in finance. “Markets price governance, credibility, consistency, and leadership maturity,” he said. Expansion asks a founder to reproduce a service across locations; public ownership would ask him to make the whole undertaking answerable to a broader audience.
And the garment he said he would keep, however worn it became? A white Giza-cotton T-shirt. It is an apt object for a founder whose business began with a close look at material. After the funding, the yacht partnerships and the overseas doors, there is still a piece of clothing someone has to want to put on again.