Your day now starts at iftar and ends at 3am
Ramadan does not reduce your sales, it moves them. From the first day, the 7am to 4pm shift that pays your rent for eleven months goes near zero. Your day now starts at iftar, builds after 9pm, and peaks between 11pm and 2am. Change the opening hours on Google, Instagram and every delivery app on day one, not on day four. A customer who sees you closed at midnight does not check again. Pin the Ramadan hours as a story highlight and put them in your bio. Most shops in Kuwait lose the first three nights purely to confusion about whether they are open.
Staffing and stock follow the same curve. Order milk and cups for a night business, not a morning one. A full Ramadan week of sales now lands inside roughly 25 trading hours spread across seven nights. Keep a small pre-iftar window from about 4pm to 5:30pm for takeaway coffee people grab on the way home. It is quiet, the margin is good, and almost nobody competes for it. Then close, reset, and reopen strong. If your team is fasting, split the shifts so the night crew is fresh at 10pm when the queue actually forms.
Content timing flips too. Posting a latte photo at 10am in Ramadan is money burned. People scroll in two windows: the tired hour before iftar, roughly 4pm to 6pm, and the long night after 9pm. Schedule your stories and Snapchat ads into those two windows and you will pay less for more attention. Change what you show as well. Nobody wants an iced americano at 2pm while fasting. Ramadan now falls in February and March, so it sits on top of Hala February and the weather outside is still good. Shoot your outdoor seating while that lasts.
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Ghabga bookings and gift boxes are the real Ramadan money
Ghabga is where the margin is. It is a late-night table a family, a diwaniya or a small company books in advance, so you are selling a booking rather than waiting for a walk-in. Price it per head and keep it simple. Most Kuwait coffee shops land between 6 and 12 KD a head for a dessert and coffee setup, with a minimum of 15 to 25 people and a 50% deposit taken at booking. One table of 20 on a quiet Tuesday night is worth more than a whole dead Ramadan afternoon, and refilling that night costs you nothing in ad spend.
Stop running these bookings through DMs. By the second week you will have forty WhatsApp threads, three double-booked nights and no deposits collected. Put the ghabga packages and the Ramadan gift boxes on a page where the customer picks the date, the headcount and pays the deposit by KNET. A small Shopify store handles the pre-orders and the deposits far better than a phone being answered mid-rush. It also means a corporate buyer can forward one link to their finance person instead of screenshotting your Instagram story and asking you to repeat the prices.
Corporate gift orders are the second stream and they close early. Companies, clinics and real-estate offices order Ramadan boxes, usually dates, a coffee bag and a branded cup, at 4 to 9 KD a box in runs of 50 to 300. Their decision happens in the two weeks before Ramadan starts, not during it. Send the catalogue with pricing and a lead time in mid-Shaaban, chase it once, and stop selling gift boxes after the twentieth night. After that the same buyer has moved on to Eid, and Eid is a different product with different packaging.
Ad costs climb all month, then Eid and summer empty the shop
Your ad costs rise every week of the month. Everyone in Kuwait advertises in Ramadan, the banks, the telecoms and every restaurant, and the auction shows it. A Meta or Snapchat click that costs you 40 to 70 fils in a normal month often lands between 90 fils and 1.2 KD in the last ten nights. Plan around that. Spend heavier in the first ten days while the auction is still cheap and the customer is still deciding where the ghabga will be, then pull back and let your bookings and your regulars carry the final week.
Then the floor drops. Eid gives you three or four strong days, families out late, kids, Eidiya money, and after that Kuwait empties out. Flights leave, and from mid-July to the end of August a serious slice of your customers is in Europe, Turkey or Georgia. Do not fight that with ad spend, because you are paying to reach people who are not in the country. Cut the budget by half, move to retention such as a subscription cup, a loyalty card or a delivery-only summer menu, and put the money back on the table in September when schools return.