Khaadi's multinational ambitions
AURORA: What was your vision for Khaadi when you opened shop in 1999?
SHAMOON SULTAN: I started Khaadi on December 13, 1999 with one small 400 square foot store in Zamzama and we had primarily fabric, menswear and some very basic kurtis for women. I was a textile graduate from Indus Valley and I didn’t know what else to do. I had worked for Noorjehan Bilgrami and another textile company and I went to India a couple of times where I saw a lot of craft promoted through retail. There was absolutely nothing of the sort in Pakistan so I thought let’s give it a try. I had no vision for the brand at that point; I just had faith in the product and what I was doing.
"We started getting feedback from day one. We were stocked out in two weeks and we had to shut down the store."
After that we started expanding our factory, then we would open the store for two hours in the evening from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and sell whatever was produced the day before. That went on for some time but it worked because retail was not developed and this was a new concept. Now you shouldn’t even plan to get into retail unless you have a 15 to 20 store model. At present, Khaadi has 40 stores across Pakistan and about 30 to 40 more coming up in the next two years. We are in 11 cities at the moment but the plan is to go into at least 50 cities of Pakistan.
A: What is your sense of how women’s ready to wear has evolved over the last few years?
SS: It hasn’t evolved at all. What are we looking at? Defence in Karachi, Gulberg in Lahore and F-6 and F-7 in Islamabad? Is that what Pakistan is? In a population of 200 million, there are maybe one or two million ready to wear customers. It has just started if you ask me.
Everyone has been talking about prêt but have we even gone out of Karachi or Lahore? And let’s look at Karachi itself, because we recently did a very extensive focus group and they have confirmed what we have been saying which is, go out to an area like Gulshan or Hyderi and see if the prêt market has even started there. I don’t think retail has evolved. Yes, retail has started to evolve but there are still too many mom and pop shops around. As organised retailers we are not even two percent of the market and out of the two percent, maybe half a percent of the entire retail spending is spent on prêt. The fabric market is still humungous and there is no comparison between fabric and prêt.