Between us, we have six kids and twelve years of Saturday mornings on Dubai pitches. We've bought the boots, lost the boots, outgrown the boots, and tried to pass on the boots when they're still good for someone else's kid.
Most of that last bit 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.
The thing is — the demand is real and the supply is real. Kids in Dubai burn through sports shoes faster than any other piece of kit. Football boots last a season at best. Running shoes get outgrown before the soles wear down. There is a constant flow of perfectly good shoes leaving one household and being needed in another, twenty minutes' drive away.
And as they get older it gets worse. Some of ours are already in adult sizes — we're not talking AED 80 second-hand football boots any more. We're talking AED 400 new 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.
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.
We wanted the version of this that worked.
So that's what we're building. KISH is a marketplace for pre-owned kids' sports shoes in Dubai. 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 — any sport your kid plays. We cover all of Dubai, keeping delivery local and quick. We'll keep adding sports as we grow, but we'd rather do fewer things well than stretch too thin.
Down the line, 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 the next chapter.
We're building this in the open. Most weeks there will 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.
— Dan & Jules