It started with a pair of football boots.
Between us we have six kids — across athletics, rugby and football — and twelve years of Saturday mornings on Dubai pitches. We have bought the boots, lost the boots, outgrown the boots, and tried to pass them on while they were still good for someone else's kid. Barely worn, replaced at full price, again and again. We knew we weren't the only parents in this city throwing money at boots that were basically new.
Most of that passing-on happens on WhatsApp.
You know the groups. Someone posts a blurry photo of a size 3 Predator with the caption good condition, AED 80, DM me. Three parents reply at once. One of them is faster but lives in Mirdif. Another is closer but offers AED 50. The seller stops replying for a day. The boots sell to the fourth person who messaged. You missed it. The next pair that comes up is too small. Your kid has another match on Saturday.
We did this for years. So did most of the parents we know.
But the WhatsApp group isn't a marketplace. It's a free-for-all. There's no checking, no protection, no recourse. You either trust the photo and the seller, or you walk away. And when you've been burned once — paid for boots that arrived with a split sole, or a size that was actually a half-size off — you stop trusting any of it.
That was the spark. Then we looked properly, and the problem got bigger.
Spikes are worse
Football boots at least come up often. Try finding running spikes in small kids' sizes in Dubai. They're expensive, the choice is thin to begin with, and they're outgrown just as fast as everything else — sometimes after a single season of school athletics. Parents end up buying whatever exists in roughly the right size, which is how children end up racing in spikes that don't fit.
For spikes, a resale marketplace doesn't just make sense. It's close to necessary.
And it gets more expensive as they grow, not less. Some of ours are already in adult sizes — so we're not talking about AED 80 second-hand boots any more. We're talking about AED 400 running shoes that last one growth spurt.
There's an environmental case here too, and it's a compelling one, but that's its own piece. What got us started was the inconvenience feeling personal and fixable.
Then we looked at our own shoe racks
Between us we've tried more running shoes than most people will in a lifetime — one of us has over 100 pairs. We're runners, and we've both bought pairs that simply didn't work out: wrong fit, wrong support, wrong everything. They sat unused while we went looking for the next one.
If resale made sense for a child's outgrown boots, it made just as much sense for those.
Somewhere in that we realised we had something to offer beyond the marketplace itself. Years of obsessing over running shoes and hunting down models that are hard to get hold of in this region — including some very good Chinese brands most people here have never heard of. And, as parents, learning the hard way how children's feet develop and how young athletes get injured. That knowledge is what The Lab is for.
What we're building
KISH is a marketplace for sports shoes in Dubai, new and pre-owned. It's built around children's and youth sizes, because that's where the problem bites hardest and where our own story began — but adult sizes belong here too, and you can list them.
Every listing is checked before it goes up. The buyer pays a small fee for that check, plus protection if the pair doesn't match how it was described. The seller doesn't pay anything on standard listings — they keep what they sell for.
Football, running, rugby, athletics, tennis. Where nothing pre-owned fits yet, or where a particular shoe is simply hard to find here, we top it up with new stock we've bought ourselves — those are labelled Sold by KISH wherever they appear. Tracking down the pairs that are hard to find in Dubai at all is a deliberate part of what we do, not an afterthought. We cover all of Dubai, keeping delivery local and quick, and we'd rather do a few things well than stretch too thin.
The rest of it
As we grow, we'd like to give something back — towards kids' sport, and getting decent kit to children who need it. We're not putting a number or a date on that yet. We'd rather do it properly than announce it early.
Further out, we want kids to have their own accounts: to list their own outgrown shoes, earn their own payouts, and have a real reason to understand what those shoes cost and why looking after them matters. That's a later chapter.
We're building this in the open, and close to home — our own network, local clubs, and families who know this problem as well as we do. Most weeks there'll be something new in The Lab: a write-up of how we check, a story from a seller, a guide for parents new to a sport. If you want in early, the waitlist is the place. We'll email you the day the shop opens.
We started with football boots because that's where our story began. The idea was always bigger than that. This is the first step.
— Dan & Jules