What it takes to run a clothing brand in Pakistan - Musings, Journey and Tidbits from behind the scenes action! Ep. 6
July 6, 2026
It was Monday, the week of the shoot. The first call of duty? Stopping by Dolmen Lahore to purchase a few basic shoes for styling the new outfits.
The Reality of Fashion Shoot Styling
Usually, we hire outside resources for our shoot styling. But since these were casuals, highly technical styling wasn't required. Secondly, we have painfully come to realize that even expensive stylists don't always give their 100% when working with small to medium businesses like ours. The best ideas and efforts are often reserved for industry giants. Too often, after spending obscene amounts of money, we were left with unmemorable styling.
This was a bitter pill to swallow, but it pushed us to dabble in in-house styling. Taking this on ourselves not only helps build a distinct visual language for our brand, but because casuals are simpler to style, it allows us to test the waters safely. We wanted to source basic options that we knew we could easily use and re-use. (Initially, we styled our own outfits when the brand began, but we stopped to let professionals do their job as we grew).
While we didn't find exactly what we needed at the mall, our team managed to source some great options online over the weekend. We ended up just grabbing a mountain of coffee sachets for shoot day and heading back to the office. You would be surprised to find how much coffee is consumed on a fashion shoot set!
A Quick Tip for New Clothing Brands If you are just starting out, we wouldn't recommend spending big budgets on buying shoot accessories. Instead, try reaching out to relevant small businesses to see if you can borrow samples in exchange for tags, mentions, and professional photos.
Prepping the Website: Aangan & Pallu
Back in the office, the plan was to work on our website for the upcoming Aangan edits and our new scarves collection. The goal was to build and finalize product names, write the descriptions, and start working on our size charts so the heavy lifting was sorted before the shoot.
You would be surprised how much time is spent finalizing product names and descriptions that are both beautifully written and SEO-friendly. Our team does a lot of research to come up with meaningful product names, mostly in Urdu as per our sitewide branding. (Unfortunately, these names are often copied left and right by other businesses, but we keep moving forward).
We built the storefront collections for both Aangan and our scarves—which we are calling Pallu (cute, right?). Then, we started locking in the specific product names. We finalized Lehr for one of our co-ord sets, as the asymmetrical embroidery mimics the shape of waves. We named another rust piece Tabassum, as it features the alphabets of our brand name embroidered directly onto the set.
This was it for the day.
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