There are some wins that feel personal. This is one of them.
Dreamdays, the UAE's go-to name for gift experiences, has just been named Best Retail Office Supplies and Gifts of the Year 2026 in the United Arab Emirates as part of the Global 100 – 2026 awards by GPMG. For a brand built on turning ordinary occasions into extraordinary memories, it's the kind of recognition that means a little more than a trophy on a shelf. It's proof that the thousands of small decisions made every day — which experience to feature, how a gift box is packaged, how quickly a customer's question gets answered — actually add up to something people notice.
GPMG's Global 100 awards recognize organizations that have set themselves apart from their peers on the world stage. It's not a popularity contest or a paid placement — it's a benchmark, a way of saying "this is what excellence in this category looks like right now." Being named the best in the Retail, Office Supplies and Gifts category for the UAE puts Dreamdays alongside some seriously accomplished companies, and it does so in a market that is anything but easy to stand out in.
The UAE gifting space is crowded. Vouchers, hampers, subscription boxes, generic "experience" platforms — there's no shortage of options for someone who wants to send a gift that isn't just another candle or gift card. What the award signals is that Dreamdays has done something different: it has built an actual ecosystem of experiences, not just a catalogue of products, and it has done it consistently enough, and well enough, to be recognized on a global stage.
Dreamdays.ae, operated by Experiences Portal Co. L.L.C, isn't a brand that popped up overnight to ride a trend. It's been in the business of turning "what should I get them?" into "wait, they can actually do that?" since 2005. Two decades in an industry that has seen countless competitors come and go is its own kind of achievement, and it explains a lot about why the platform works the way it does today.
Longevity in the gifting business isn't just about staying afloat — it's about learning, again and again, what people actually want when they buy a gift. Not just a nice thing to unwrap, but a moment they'll talk about weeks later. That's the philosophy baked into everything Dreamdays does, and it's very likely the exact thing the judges were looking at when this award was decided.
Anyone who has spent five minutes browsing dreamdays will notice it doesn't feel like a typical retail site. There's no wall of identical gift cards or generic mugs. Instead, there's a genuinely wide spread of categories: adventure activities, driving and passenger experiences, spa days, desert safaris, fine dining, arts and crafts, short breaks, kids' activities, luxury rides, city sightseeing, sky flyer experiences, water adventures, yacht and cruise outings — the list goes on.
That range matters more than it sounds. A gift platform is only as good as its ability to match a person, not just an occasion. Someone shopping for their father's retirement is not shopping for the same thing as someone planning a surprise for their partner's birthday, and Dreamdays treats those two shoppers very differently. Its occasion-based browsing — birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, retirements, weddings, Mother's Day, Father's Day, even a "thank you" category for those moments that don't fit anywhere else — makes it easy to land on something that actually fits the person receiving it, not just the calendar date.
Then there's the flexibility for the truly undecided: gift cards in a range of denominations, so the recipient gets to pick their own adventure. It's a small thing, but it solves the most common gifting problem there is — the fear of getting it wrong.
What often gets missed about Dreamdays is that it isn't only a consumer platform. Its corporate gifting arm has quietly become one of its strongest offerings, giving companies across the UAE a way to reward employees and clients with something more memorable than a branded pen or a fruit basket. In a region where corporate gifting culture runs deep — client appreciation, Eid gifts, year-end recognition, milestone celebrations — offering an actual experience instead of a physical object is a meaningfully different pitch, and it's one that resonates with HR teams and business owners looking for something that photographs well and feels genuine.
That dual focus — serving individual gift-givers on one side and corporate clients on the other — is part of what makes the "Retail, Office Supplies and Gifts" category such an apt fit for this recognition. It's rare to find a single platform doing both well.
Awards like this one rarely happen because of a single decision or a single quarter of good numbers. They happen because a team, quietly, keeps showing up and doing the unglamorous work: curating new experiences, vetting suppliers across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah and Umm Al Quwain, resolving customer issues quickly, and making sure the website itself is fast, clear and easy to book from on a phone at 11pm the night before someone's birthday.
That kind of behind-the-scenes consistency doesn't always make headlines. This time, it did.
For a brand, an award is never really the finish line — it's a marker. It tells the market "we got something right," and it tells the team "keep going." For Dreamdays.ae, this Global 100 win arrives at a moment when the appetite for experience-based gifting across the UAE is only growing. More people are choosing memories over material items, and more businesses are looking for ways to make appreciation feel personal rather than transactional. Dreamdays.ae is positioned right in the middle of that shift — and now it has the recognition to match the work that got it there.
If you haven't explored what Dreamdays has to offer yet, this might be the perfect moment to see what all the recognition is about. Whether it's a spa day, a desert adventure, a fine dining experience, or a corporate gifting solution for your whole team, there's likely something on the platform built for exactly the occasion you have in mind.
Congratulations to the entire Dreamdays team on this well-earned recognition.