Brand & Communication

Zein the Boy

What if a character could open a whole world of curiosity?

All work

Client

Zein the Boy / Hippocampus Creations

Year

2026

Service

Brand & Communication

In short

Zein the Boy already had a character, products and a philosophy of kindness and curiosity. We built communication for two audiences, children and the parents who introduce them, and a new YouTube format: How It's Made in the UAE.

Strategy

One brand, two audiences: children and the parents who introduce them.

Action

How It's Made in the UAE, piloted at National Paints. Non-follower views up from 51.3% to 57.3%.

57.3%

views from non-followers (was 51.3%)

+6pp vs previous period

3.31%

interactions per view (was 3.14%)

vs 3.14% in the previous period

2.57%

profile visits per view (was 2.25%)

vs 2.25% in the previous period

How we worked

See the process →

Strategy

One brand, two ways of speaking: values and intention for parents, stories and play for children.

Concept

How It's Made in the UAE: a recurring format where Zein takes children behind the scenes of how things are made.

Production

The National Paints pilot: storyboard, pre-production, directing, filming and post-production by GOMBOC.

Community

Social and YouTube moving toward children's own voices, real experiences and Zein in everyday life.

Learn & adapt

Between reporting periods, non-follower views rose from 51.3% to 57.3%, with more interaction and profile visits per view.

The story

One brand. Two ways of speaking.

For parents, communication explores values, childhood and the thinking behind the brand. For children, the same ideas become stories, play, questions and adventures. The objective wasn't simply to keep publishing. It was to keep expanding the world.

Zein’s world

Then we took Zein somewhere new.

Together with the Zein team, we developed How It's Made in the UAE. The first adventure took us inside National Paints, translating an industrial process into something a child could understand without removing the curiosity.

How it’s made pilot

What changed in percentage terms.

Across the reporting periods, the share of views coming from non-followers increased from 51.3% to 57.3% – a gain of 6 percentage points. At the same time, interactions per view moved from 3.14% to 3.31%, while profile visits per view increased from 2.25% to 2.57%. These percentages give us a clearer proof point than views alone: the content was not only being seen outside the existing community, it was becoming slightly more efficient at generating interaction and profile interest.

Performance + future format

Percentage proof

We didn't just create another piece of content. Together, we created somewhere Zein can go next.

GOMBOC

Communication Strategy · Social Media · Content Strategy · Format Development · Creative Direction · YouTube Production · Film · Post-Production

Inside the Work

The long read

Zein already had something many brands spend years trying to create. A character. A philosophy. And a world built around values such as kindness, curiosity and meaningful childhood experiences. When the Zein team came to GOMBOC, the opportunity wasn’t to reinvent that world. It was to help more people enter it. Our initial conversations centred around social media and YouTube. Those eventually became two sides of the same communication challenge: How do you build a children’s brand that speaks meaningfully to both children and the adults around them?

One brand. Two audiences.

A parent and a child don’t experience Zein in the same way. Parents can engage with conversations around kindness, childhood development, family experiences and the intention behind the brand. Children experience those ideas differently. They need stories. Games. Characters. Questions. Discovery. Moments they recognise from their own lives. So the communication system had to make room for both. The early strategy established the foundations of Zein’s world through storytelling, family experiences, curiosity, kindness and play, including founder stories, everyday acts of kindness, curiosity prompts, family games and the wider Zein ecosystem. As that foundation became established, the strategy evolved. July and August moved further toward children’s voices, emotional connection, imagination, conversations and real-world experiences, positioning Zein increasingly as part of everyday childhood rather than only as a character or product. That evolution was intentional. A brand world should reveal itself over time.

Then we asked where Zein could take children next.

Social media allowed us to build the world in smaller pieces. YouTube gave us room to explore it. Together with the Zein team, we developed a new recurring concept: How It’s Made in the UAE. The premise was deliberately simple. Zein visits UAE businesses and places to discover how the things children encounter in the world around them are actually made. Curiosity was already part of the brand. Now it had a format. The Zein team connected the pilot with National Paints. From there, GOMBOC developed and executed the creative and production approach around the visit.

A factory is full of information. A child needs a story.

Paint manufacturing can become technical very quickly. The challenge wasn’t finding information. It was deciding what a child actually needs in order to understand and enjoy the journey. We needed to simplify without making the experience empty. Questions had to feel natural. The sequence needed movement. Processes needed to become visually understandable. And the pacing needed to work for an audience whose attention isn’t guaranteed simply because the subject is educational. GOMBOC handled the format development, storytelling, pre-production, filming and post-production. The result was the pilot episode of a concept designed from the beginning to continue beyond one location.

Then we introduced it to the audience.

The launch gave us an early indication of the format’s potential. The main How It’s Made in the UAE social content generated 12,279 views and reached 8,021 accounts in the performance data shared with us. The related YouTube teaser generated another 3,399 views. Those are useful signals. But the more important outcome is what exists behind them. A repeatable format. National Paints can be episode one. Another UAE company can become episode two. Another process becomes another question. Another question becomes another adventure. That is where content begins creating longer-term brand value.

The percentages tell us more than the totals.

Raw views are useful, but for an ongoing communication strategy we also want to know whether the content is reaching new people and whether those views are creating meaningful actions. From the 15 June-15 July reporting period to 15 July-15 August, the share of views from non-followers rose from 51.3% to 57.3% – an increase of 6 percentage points. Interactions represented 3.14% of views in the earlier period and 3.31% in the following period. Profile visits moved from 2.25% of views to 2.57%. We would use those percentages on the case-study page because they show the strategic direction more clearly: increasing discovery beyond the existing community while improving the proportion of views that led to interaction or profile exploration.

From content calendar to brand world.

The wider Zein strategy works on the same principle. A founder story has one role. A child’s perspective has another. A product moment has another. A kindness mission has another. How It’s Made in the UAE has another. Individually, they’re pieces of content. Together, they help explain what living inside Zein’s world actually feels like. And that gives the communication somewhere to grow.