How Daari Mooch turned a beard-oil bottle into a 3M brand

A Faisalabad kid in a UK dorm, looking for beard oil

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation in the larger Endeavor Pakistan series — a hunt for the country’s most exciting fifty businesses — and introducing Ibrahim Shaukat as the founder of what is now Pakistan’s largest men’s grooming brand. Daari Mooch is doing more than three million dollars in revenue, runs four retail outlets and one salon, and ships through roughly seven hundred trade shops. The point Muzamil keeps coming back to is that none of this is a Tony and Guy story yet — Pakistan is still in the early innings of category formation, and the founders who can stop patting themselves on the back long enough to keep building are the ones who will end up running the decade.

Ibrahim’s own origin is unfussy. He was born in Faisalabad — the textile lab of Pakistan, as he calls it — into a business family where the dinner-table conversation was always about selling, trading, or running a factory. He went to Beacon House and finished his last school year at Roots, then left for the University of Edinburgh in 2014 on his own steam to study for a bachelor’s degree. His honest read on his Faisalabad schooling is that “we weren’t studying, we were figuring out how to survive — boys would sit in the evening and watch a stage drama, then go to tuitions, then socialise at tuitions, because there was no other way to socialise.”

The Daari Mooch idea found him by accident. He had grown a long beard and long hair, he wanted beard oil, and when he searched for it in Pakistan he found nothing — no local product, no imported product on a shelf, just one item floating on Shaheen for around three thousand two hundred rupees. “If I’m a user,” he tells Muzamil, “then for sure there have to be others like me.” He drew a sample formula on a Google Doc — a habit he says made him feel productive even when he was executing nothing — and ordered a three-litre Chinese sample because the supplier’s MOQ of five thousand units was impossible for a student.

The first hundred bottles, and the discipline that almost did not survive

The first batch was a hundred bottles each of three oils, hand-stickered with a funnel and a label he applied himself. He launched in September 2017. Facebook ads were already a known instrument, and two friends — Umar and his father Qamar Awtab — walked him through Shopify, Facebook ads, and courier setup at a moment when courier APIs did not really exist in Pakistan. Ibrahim is direct about the credit: “Huge credit to these guys. I’d been telling myself I was going to do something for two years and executing nothing — Google Docs were giving me the high. These were the guys who actually got me to ship.”

The first hundred bottles sold out in two weeks. The second shipment, which he tried to land in time for the then-fashionable “No-Shave November” campaign, got stuck in customs and arrived in December. He called every customer himself. Muzamil presses him on a point that runs through the whole conversation: 2017 to 2025 is eight years of work, and most of that time the business was not throwing off serious cash. Ibrahim does not try to dress it up. From 2020 onwards he was on a 150,000 PKR salary as founder, often did not draw it, and only this August finally received the accrued back-salary as a lump sum — which immediately went into a Europe trip.

Where most founders would have argued they had “privilege,” Ibrahim and Muzamil disagree productively. Muzamil’s argument is that the family’s business background was real, but the family’s specific objections — “beta, focus on textiles; come back and run the factory” — were a cost, not a subsidy. Ibrahim agrees: “I took a loan from my own ego. In my case, ego was somewhat necessary. I told my Naana I would only sell oil and proteins.” It is the cleanest line in this part of the conversation about why some founders survive and others fold — the ones who survive carry a stubbornness that does not respond to family logic.

Faisalabad does not yet have a middle class

Before the business mechanics, Muzamil asks Ibrahim to read his home city honestly. The answer reframes a lot of the assumptions outsiders have about secondary cities. Ibrahim acknowledges the infrastructure has changed — there is a society with a full lake running in front of every house, padel courts have arrived, Green Avenue is booming, and his brother is opening a padel facility in partnership with Legends. But the social shape is still binary. “The mill owner is one class, the mill worker is another. Majority of the business is manufacturing, so that kind of talent is not being produced here. The middle class doesn’t really exist.”

Muzamil offers the parallel of Islamabad in the 1990s and 2000s — bureaucracy on one side, headquartered executives on the other, no middle layer of consumers, and a sudden phase change after 2008 when displaced wealth from the north pushed the city past a critical mass. Ibrahim’s reply is sharper than the optimistic version. Lahore is two hours away. Faisalabad does not get to become its own lifestyle gravity well because anyone with weekend money simply drives to Lahore. “Lahore being so close also keeps Faisalabad from developing.” Outliers like the FAST-Faisalabad graduate earning five thousand dollars from home are real, but Ibrahim refuses to mainstream them: “I’ll still put them in the outliers category. They haven’t come into scale yet.”

The MOQ, the ad agency, and a six-month near-death

The single most useful passage in the conversation, for any founder reading this, is Ibrahim’s account of what almost killed the company in 2022. By then Daari Mooch had survived COVID — which was actually good for e-commerce — and had been growing through 2020 and 2021. The post-2022 economic crash collapsed consumer markets. Ibrahim, looking for sophistication, did what a lot of founders do at that scale: he hired a large advertising agency.

It went badly. “These people were used to spending a lot of money. They came in, took the revenue we were doing, brought us 50 percent below it, and started spending double on ads.” Daari Mooch lost six months in constant loss. The lesson he draws is not anti-agency, but it is exact: “E-commerce, even now, is mostly something founders know. The talent didn’t exist yet. The agency was good at TVCs, not at our P&L.” Three videos eventually went viral, and the company climbed back. He says it plainly: “I’m not the best person in Pakistan at much, but for my own business, on e-commerce, I was the best person in Pakistan.”

The other operational fact he ties to this period: from day one Daari Mooch had SOPs and documentation, because as a sixteen-year-old internship at EY he had audited a listed company where the CEO met the CFO for tea once a year and the firm ran on outsourced operations. “That experience gave me the vision that there is a bigger level to business. I want to be a business owner, not self-employed.” That sentence — business owner versus self-employed — is the line he is still drawing inside Daari Mooch today.

Stepping down as CEO, and giving away equity

In 2024 Ibrahim moved back to Faisalabad to spend time with family after ten years of living alone, hired a CEO, and re-titled himself director. Muzamil is openly surprised by this — Pakistani founders generally do not let go of their first child. Ibrahim’s reasoning is structural: if the company cannot run without him, it is not a company yet. He spent 2024 in a deliberate plateau, restructuring teams, processes and workflows, on the explicit principle that “documentation is what has helped us actually be able to do this.”

The other half of the restructuring is equity. Daari Mooch granted ESOPs to leadership, and Ibrahim describes the conversation he had with that group last week as the framing he wants to live with: “Now we are partners. In a way we’ve had a marriage. We have to make it work. You can’t be going there while I’m going here — we have to be on the same page.” His diagnosis of the Pakistani talent problem is the inversion of the founder’s complaint: ownership is missing because founders refuse to share it. “Skin in the game is necessary. Without it, an employee won’t take the extra headache. If the pie gets bigger, my percentage gets smaller — but the pie is bigger. I am someone who believes in doing things together.”

Muzamil takes the point further, and Ibrahim does not push back: in Pakistan, talented people get poached by side investors who throw money at them, the company they leave for usually fails, but in the process the original company gets hollowed out. ESOPs are the only structural defence.

Why distribution and salons are the next two bets

Muzamil is direct about what excites him in Daari Mooch’s plan: not the new SKUs, but the channel expansion. Ibrahim agrees. “If you’re ever building a brand, a brand is always omnichannel. In Pakistan more than 90 percent of transactions are happening offline.” The trade play is to push from roughly seven hundred shops today to around two thousand. The salon play is more interesting, because it is also the brand’s relationship layer with the consumer.

The pricing tells you the positioning. A haircut is 1,000 PKR. A beard trim is 500. A two-to-three-thousand-rupee membership knocks those down to 650 and 350 — meaning a member walks out of a clean salon experience having paid roughly a thousand rupees for the whole sitting. The membership also gets them 20 percent off products. The salon is now profitable, and Ibrahim sees room for fifty to a hundred outlets at that price point in Pakistan.

Muzamil presses on positioning. He maps the salon market the way he sees it from Islamabad: roadside hundred-rupee cuts at the bottom, sub-sector neighbourhood barbers at three to six hundred, and at the top a clutch of Tony and Guy and Depilex-style operators competing for the top one percent. He argues the real opportunity is not disrupting Tony and Guy; it is disrupting the value chain below it, where “my cook is willing to spend three hundred extra if he gets the experience his employer gets.” Ibrahim says that is exactly the gap they are going after. The other operators have stopped scaling. “Per square foot profit and revenue goes up because nobody has actually focused on this side.”

He is candid about the operational reality too. Daari Mooch has not solved appointment culture in Pakistan — people do not show up on time — but they are running reminders and prioritising repeat. The next branch is the experiment: do they run it themselves, or bring on an operating partner? They are already in conversations with people inside the salon business, and the model they want is flexible — pure investor, pure operator, or both — but only after they have a bulletproof unit economic model. Ibrahim’s pacing on this is striking: “We want to figure out one salon first.”

Perfumes, deodorants and the AOV math

By the back half of the conversation Ibrahim opens the playbook for new categories. Daari Mooch is launching perfumes next month and rolling out hair dyes. The why is not category romance; it is unit economics. “Perfume is launching primarily because we want to improve our AOV. Shipping cost stays the same. When you divide shipping by AOV, the percentage drops, and fixed costs as a percentage of total sale start to diminish.”

The supply-side decision is just as practical. Fragrance is imported, but the rest of the product is produced locally with a partner the company already works with, because they have been making non-gas deodorants for years. He shares a quiet insight from running that line: “A deodorant is, in a way, a perfume. If a perfume has 25 percent scent, a deodorant has around 10 percent. Two and a half puffs of a deodorant equal a perfume. A lot of people who can’t afford perfumes are buying non-gas deodorants and using them as perfumes.” That is the consumer signal that justifies a daily-wear, affordable perfume launch rather than a luxury one.

The same infrastructure thinking applies to the ventures arm Ibrahim is now spinning up. The pitch is simple: Daari Mooch already has trade, courier, warehousing, PR, content and brand-building infrastructure. A new founder with product-market fit at one to two crore in monthly revenue can plug in and grow inside that machine. He even names what he expects the founder to own — the product itself, the formulation, the offline distributor terms — because everything else around it is already solved.

What twenty-five years from now actually looks like

Muzamil closes the way he closes most TBT interviews — by asking Ibrahim where Pakistan goes from here, without the ifs and buts. Ibrahim does not give the comfortable answer. The historical analysis, he says, is that since 1947 every generation has told itself Pakistan will be better, and Pakistan has not been better. The current snapshot does show consumer growth and a moving stock market, but he is unwilling to extrapolate those into a transformation story. “I’m twenty-nine. What have I really seen or done that lets me tell you it will be better? My honest read is that throughout the last several generations, everyone has been telling themselves the same thing.”

It is a deliberately undramatic ending for a brand whose own trajectory is the opposite of undramatic. The point Ibrahim is making is the one he has lived inside Daari Mooch for eight years: stop selling yourself a story you can’t back with the numbers, build the system that does not depend on you, and let the work compound. Muzamil signs off at the one-hour-forty mark by telling Ibrahim he is most excited about the salon thread — the place where, between the two of them, the largest unbuilt opportunity in the conversation sits.