What it takes to run a clothing brand in Pakistan - Musings, Journey and Tidbits from behind the scenes action! Ep. 8

Date: July 8, 2026

Welcome back to another episode of our behind-the-scenes journey! Today’s mission was simple: sort out the absolute maximum number of things on our to-do list. From finalizing casual drops to tackling small business growing pains, here is what a day in the life of running a Pakistani clothing brand actually looks like.

🐾 The "Feed a Stray" Campaign & Summer Scarves

I don't know if I’ve mentioned this before, but we are gearing up to launch 8 extremely buttery-soft, summer-friendly scarves meant for everyday wear. Four of these feature custom cat-centric designs.

Last Saturday, we brainstormed a marketing campaign for this launch called Feed a Stray.

• The Concept: For every cat scarf sold, the customer receives a complimentary pouch of cat kibble to feed a stray animal in their neighborhood.

• The Design: We spent today building the design for the cardboard tag that will attach to the pouch and explain the campaign.
  

• The Sourcing: Finding affordable, small pouches online turned out to be way too expensive. So, we sent our sourcing expert, Wasim, to hunt for bulk options in Shah Alam and other wholesale markets.

• The Kibble: Procuring the bulk cat food was the easiest part! Most of our team members are cat parents, and we already buy weekly food for our office cats and the local strays that visit us.

🌿 The Aangan Drop: Organic Cotton Co-ords & Shoot Prep

Next up, our first Aangan drop featuring pure organic cotton co-ords!

All our product names are officially locked in. We’ve even finalized the product descriptions and knocked out the technical SEO details (like meta descriptions) to make sure everything ranks perfectly on the website.
The only sample still pending is the Alam Set in black, which was sent out today for embroidery sampling. For the rest of the collection, we had our Fashion Designer, Fatima, bring in the samples for a final trial. Once reviewed, they just need a final iron before they are camera-ready!
To save time on shoot day, I’ll be taking the reviewed samples home to finalize the jewelry and product styling. We'll take test photos with the jewelry beforehand so the actual shoot day goes off without a hitch.

📏 Wearing 10 Hats & Sorting Size Charts

Later in the day, we asked our Production Manager, Amir, to review and finalize the size chart measurements with Fatima. After their initial review, they brought it to me—Maria, the Creative Head (and one of the overworked, underpaid founders!).

Small Biz Reality Check: This is exactly what it takes to build a small business from scratch. You wear ten different hats and do most of the jobs yourself because you simply can't afford a massive team yet.

📉 Laam Sales & Learning from "Rookie Mistakes"

Today, we also analyzed our sales trajectory on Laam. We currently have a sale running there, and after reviewing the numbers, we decided to extend it for certain items.
Here is some honest behind-the-scenes transparency: we have a huge inventory of certain products that weren't moving fast enough on our own store, but are performing much better on Laam so we decided it would be best to extend the sale on them there.

Why the huge inventory? Last year, we over-produced to ensure we wouldn't have dry spells or out-of-stock items between collections. It was a classic rookie mistake, triggered by the fact that we didn't have a production head or a proper design team to facilitate inventory flow at the time.
Alhamdulillah, we are slowly but surely building out those technical resources now, and learning from our past missteps!

📝 Wrapping Up the Day

The final hours of the day were spent reviewing and editing the patterns for all the outfits. It gets incredibly tedious and tiring, but by the end of it, Fatima and I had successfully sorted out a massive chunk of our workload.
Right before clocking out, our content guy, Subhan, came in, and we finalized a bunch of fresh content ideas for the upcoming scarves and cotton casuals range.

And that’s a wrap on today! Stay tuned for more updates as we get closer to launch day.

Read Previous Episode Here.

Let us know in the comments what you think of the 'Feed a Stray' campaign.