Why Haseeb Khan quit fashion photography for a product brand

From a small city to BNU, with parental permission to fail

The episode opens with Muzamil noting that he had been trying to get Haseeb S Khan on the show for three or four months. The wait, it turns out, was worth it.

Haseeb grew up in Sargodha, completed his matriculation on an airbase, and set off on the standard FSC pre-engineering track. He was a strong student in school — competitive in science exhibitions, interested in graphic design competitions — but the moment he entered first and second year of FSC, his marks collapsed. “Interest saaraa loose ho gaya,” he says plainly. He was doing well in extracurriculars while barely passing his classes.

What followed was an unusually honest conversation with his parents. Rather than forcing him back onto the engineering path, they told him: whatever you want to do in life, be at the top of it. If you are going to be at the bottom of engineering, there is no point. “Jo karo dil se karo” — do what you do with your heart. Haseeb credits this as one of the most important moments of his life. It gave him accountability alongside freedom. He chose design, considered NCA and Beaconhouse National University, and ultimately enrolled at BNU.

He graduated in 2016. The institution, he says, groomed him in ways that went beyond curriculum. Coming from a smaller city into a very different environment taught him how to grow. He also makes a broader point that Muzamil picks up on: parents who give their children the freedom to make decisions often earn more respect from those children, not less. “Unki jo respect hai unke mind mein badh jaati hai.” Forcing the modern generation with a stick, he adds, only produces rebellion.

Freelancing during university, not after

By 2014 or 2015, while still at BNU, Haseeb had already started taking on local freelance design projects. A teacher connected him to a client, a friend passed on a project they did not want — the network of the institution was doing its work. He was earning and building a portfolio before he had a degree.

His argument here is direct: if you freelance two years before graduation, you arrive at the job market without the fresh-graduate stamp. Your portfolio speaks first. “Agar aapki starting salary thi 42, 50 — toh woh aapka portfolio dekhke aapko direct sixty, seventy, 80 par le jaayega.” The portfolio removes the ceiling that a blank CV imposes.

Muzamil pushes on this, and Haseeb confirms: almost everyone from his batch at BNU found work. The demand for visual communication is structural — every brand needs to communicate its image, and that requires visuals. Graphic design, he says, cannot become outdated.

Five years in fashion photography, and why he walked away

After graduating, Haseeb worked on a retainer basis with Nine Lines, a creative agency that handled fashion brands including Cross Stitch and BTW. This is where his fashion photography career began — starting with a sunglasses shoot — and where his portfolio built rapidly. As he posted work on social media, the magnet effect kicked in: one project led to another.

Muzamil asks whether fashion photography is as exciting from the inside as it looks from the outside. Haseeb’s answer is measured. At the start, yes. His initial goal was to shoot at a fashion week, to be on the runway. He went. What he found was a crowd of photographers standing in one spot, with no real creative thought behind the images. “There is no thought to it.”

The deeper frustration was structural. Corporate fashion brands — Sapphire and similar — were professional and gave him creative freedom. Designer-led fashion, however, had a chronic time problem. A call time of 8am would mean a shoot starting at noon. The model would arrive at 1pm, spend an hour in makeup, and the photographer who had been on set since 8am would be shooting at 2pm. If the photographer arrived late, he would be reprimanded. No one communicated delays. “Yeh baat hai jis wajah se maine is fashion photography ko kam kar diya apne liye.”

He reached a boiling point and quit fashion photography around early 2021, after roughly five years. Product photography continued, and eventually became the foundation for something else entirely.

The thirst that became mytype.store

The transition from service provider to product founder came from a specific frustration. Every time Haseeb designed something — a banner, a layout, a visual — the client would ask for a font change, a colour change, something that unravelled the entire logic of the design. The look and feel would collapse, and then the client would say it no longer felt right. “Ab unhe pata hai kyun mazaa nahi aa raha?” He could not explain it to them. They had broken it themselves.

“Woh jo thirst thi na — yeh mera product hai.” He wanted to make something where the design decisions were entirely his own. He is clear that he did not invent anything new. The insight was simpler: presentation, thought, and a distinct touch are what make a product stand out.

mytype.store started with planners, then expanded into gifting options, and now includes pantry jars — glass storage containers for spices with custom-printed labels. The diversification was deliberate: if one product line faces a sourcing problem, another can sustain the business.

Haseeb works from a studio in his basement. His wife Maham, who studied design at BNU and is now a photographer focused on weddings and fashion, contributes to mytype.store through content creation and product ideation. She is, he says, a third opinion — a testing layer before anything goes to market.

The real cost of building a product brand in Pakistan

Sourcing is the first wall. Since global shipping chains were disrupted, material availability has become unpredictable. A specific paper used for one product run may not exist the next time. “Aapne jo mehnat ki, aapne photography ki, aapne website par maintain kiya — aap kitne bech loge?” If the paper changes, every photograph, every listing, every piece of work has to be redone. The internal cost of time is real even when the cash cost seems low.

Muzamil adds from his own experience that the deeper problem in Pakistan is the absence of a brand culture among suppliers. Large printing houses are set up for Primark packaging or Punjab Textbook Board volumes. A small brand ordering a few hundred units is an inconvenience to them. Quality control is inconsistent. Haseeb found his way through by splitting vendors — corrugated packaging from a specialist corrugation supplier, printed materials from a separate vendor who understood his standards. “Unka jo hai woh apni taraf se theek hai.”

The packaging for the planners is engineered specifically: the book sits one inch away from each corner inside the box, so that when a corner is hit in transit, the book itself is not damaged. Returns are currently around 3%, against an industry standard of 7%. The enforcement behind that number is strict: if a customer refuses delivery at the doorstep without prior communication, they are blocked permanently. “Main aapki zaroorat nahi hai. I will find another customer jo ke mujhe loyal hai.”

Pricing as a discipline, not a guess

One of the most concrete sections of the conversation is on pricing. Muzamil observes that almost no one talks about pricing openly — people are afraid that revealing their cost structure will expose them. Haseeb lays out the model he uses.

Start with the cost of the product including packaging. Multiply by three. That three-times price is your launch price. On top of that, one times covers operations and marketing. One times is your margin. The structure means you can offer discounts of up to 70% and still recover costs, because the margin was built in from the beginning.

In practice: the first 20% of units sell at full price on launch excitement. That alone recovers a significant portion of the cost of goods. Then media buying begins, running at roughly 20% margin. What remains — around 50% of inventory — can be moved with a sale. “Ek din mein humne sattar percent maal becha.” The person watching from the outside sees a 50% discount and thinks the seller is losing money. They are not. The model was designed for exactly this.

His broader point is that marketing spend is not optional. “Aapne agar business chalaana hai Pakistan mein — at least 20% aapki cost of marketing hogi.” Brands that refuse to spend on Facebook and Instagram ads and wait for customers to come on their own are waiting for something that will not happen without presence.

The gap in Pakistan’s design education

Muzamil raises a concern he has been sitting with: Pakistan’s freelancing boom has brought a large number of people into design who know Photoshop but are not designers. They are, as he puts it, Photoshoppers — people with a technical vocational skill, not a design practice. Can they be upskilled?

Haseeb agrees the gap is real. His diagnosis is that design education in Pakistan introduces students to tools first, then to fundamentals, and then — in third and fourth year — to specialisations: illustration, UI/UX, typography. The problem is that most people who come through freelancing stop at the tool stage. “Hum skill seekh ke ruk jaate hain.”

The demand for specialised designers is enormous. UI/UX designers are highly paid globally. Illustrators can build a personal style and sell it as a product. He points to Shaidel Malik as an example of someone who built a signature body of work that eventually reached Marvel. “Ek certain type ka aapka signature work ban jaata hai na — toh woh ek tarah ki direction ho sakti hai.”

Muzamil pushes further: could a school of design — not a university, but a track-based platform — take a working Fiverr freelancer and, over three to four years of one course at a time, build them into a complete designer? Haseeb thinks it is possible and necessary. The information exists on platforms like Skillshare, but it is spread out and unstructured. What is missing is a curated, Pakistan-specific curriculum with clear specialisation tracks. The willingness to learn, he adds, has to come from the individual. No institution will hold your hand. “Woh hamaari apne upar hai ke aapne kya seekhna hai, kya absorb karna hai.”

Teaching at BNU, and the limits of leniency

Haseeb taught at BNU for a period. He went in wanting to give students the comfort he had not always felt as a student himself — to signal that he understood their excuses because he had made the same ones. The result was predictable. “Agar yeh humein space de raha hai toh hum isko full use kar rahe hain.” Students pushed the leniency as far as it would go, and he eventually had to revert to warnings and deadlines.

His reflection is not bitter. He understands the dynamic. But he is clear that growth cannot stop at a certain point. “Hum grow karna band kar dete hain. Jabke growth band nahi honi chahiye.”

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Haseeb where he sees the e-commerce space in Pakistan going. Haseeb’s answer is that the infrastructure is arriving — digital payments, new platforms — but execution is consistently half-hearted. He tried selling on Daraz and found the backend so poorly built that he could not even upload images properly. “Basics hi out thi.” More platforms are needed, and they need to be built properly. The 17% sales tax on physical retail, he adds, is a structural problem that forces quality down — if the government takes 17% off the top, there is simply less room to invest in the product.

Muzamil closes by noting what makes mytype.store worth watching: it is a design-led brand in a market where design-led thinking is rare. The thought behind the product, the packaging, the pricing, and the returns policy all reflect the same sensibility. That, in Pakistan’s e-commerce landscape, is still unusual enough to matter.