Sixteen years ago, a young woman from Delhi named Mamta Kumar arrived in Dubai carrying little more than a fascination with beauty, detail and the way a well-made experience can change someone’s mood. Today, she runs Berrycino, a boutique gifting brand that has quietly built a following among residents who want their gifts to feel less like transactions and more like moments.
Mamta’s story is not the conventional “overnight success” narrative that gets recycled in this city’s entrepreneurship circles. It began, instead, in the cabin of an aircraft.
“I have always been a people’s person,” Mamta says, describing the instinct that has shaped nearly every professional decision she has made. “I have genuinely enjoyed connecting with people and creating meaningful experiences.” That instinct first found a formal outlet in the airline industry, where she spent years learning the mechanics of hospitality. Not the theory of it, but the daily, unglamorous practice of reading a stranger’s needs in seconds, defusing frustration with a tone of voice, and treating every interaction as though it were the only one that mattered.
It is a training ground rarely credited in business profiles, but for her, it was formative. Airline work is an education in customer service under pressure, in communication across cultures, and in understanding people from radically different walks of life, skills that do not show up on a balance sheet but shape how a founder eventually builds a brand. Dubai, a city assembled from nearly every nationality on earth, was an apt place to absorb that education.
Somewhere along the way, the instinct for hospitality collided with an older, quieter pull: a love of creativity, beautiful details and design. “I have always been drawn towards creativity, beautiful details, design and creating experiences for people,” she says of her own background, and it is this collision, service instinct meeting artistic sensibility, that eventually produced Berrycino.
A gift that carries a story
Berrycino is not, by its founder’s own description, a conventional gifting business. It specialises in handcrafted edible creations, bespoke bouquets and beautifully curated gifting experiences, the kind of offering that resists being reduced to a product category. Ask her why she started it, and the answer has nothing to do with market gaps or spreadsheets.
“I wanted to create something that goes beyond a conventional gift,” Mamta explains, “something personal, artistic and memorable, where the presentation and the emotion behind the gift are equally important.” It is a distinction that matters more than it might first appear. In a market saturated with same-day flower deliveries and generic hamper services, Berrycino’s proposition is emotional rather than logistical: not merely getting something to someone, but making sure what arrives says something true.
That philosophy extends into how she talks about her craft more broadly. “I believe that the smallest details can create the biggest impact,” she says, “and that every gift should have a story and a feeling behind it.”
It is a line that could easily read as marketing gloss, except that it maps directly onto the choices Berrycino makes: handcrafted rather than mass-produced, curated rather than catalogued, bespoke rather than templated.
Where the ideas come from
Ask any creative entrepreneur what fuels their work and you often get a vague answer about “inspiration.” Hers is more specific. Art, flowers, creativity, beautiful packaging and, above all, people: these are the raw materials she returns to. “Turning simple ideas into something extraordinary” is how she frames the actual work of the business, taking an unremarkable brief, a birthday, an anniversary, a corporate thank-you, and finding the detail that elevates it.
That process appears to genuinely energise her, rather than exhaust her. “I enjoy creating, experimenting with new concepts, meeting people and constantly learning something new,” she says. The inverse is equally telling: what she dislikes is “anything that limits creativity or makes things feel ordinary and repetitive,” a founder’s aversion less to failure than to sameness, which in a gifting business is arguably the more dangerous trap. It would be easy for a brand built on bespoke experiences to slide into repeatable formulas once demand grows. Her stated discomfort with the ordinary suggests a founder actively resisting that drift.
The moment that makes it worthwhile
For all the talk of creativity and craft, what she describes as the real reward is disarmingly simple: watching someone open what she has made. “Seeing someone’s reaction when they receive something I have created, that genuine ‘wow’ moment is what keeps me going,” she says. It is the kind of detail that would sound sentimental from most entrepreneurs, but from someone whose entire career began in customer-facing hospitality, it reads as consistent, a throughline from years spent reading passengers’ faces to now reading the faces of people opening a Berrycino box.
Sixteen years after landing in Dubai, Mamta has become something of a case study in how this city rewards a particular kind of founder: one who arrives without a fixed plan but with a clear sensibility, and lets the business take shape around it. Berrycino did not emerge from a business school pitch deck. It emerged from an airline cabin, a love of flowers and packaging, and a conviction that presentation and emotion are not decoration on top of a gift. They are the gift.
As Dubai’s gifting and boutique-retail scene continues to grow more crowded, competing on price and speed of delivery, Berrycino’s founder is betting on the opposite: slowness, detail and story. It is a wager that depends entirely on her own instincts holding up at scale, the same instincts, by her account, that have guided her since her very first year in the industry.
For now, the “wow” moments keep coming, one carefully wrapped gift at a time.
