Mina Salman built Bagallery from her couch — then learned how funding really works

A 390th episode that opens with a confession about VC mythology

The episode opens with Muzamil framing Mina Salman as someone who, unusually for a founder on his show, did not arrive with a polished origin myth. “She was able to be raw enough to tell the actual journey,” he says in his cold-open, before walking the viewer through the arc that the conversation will eventually trace: a Karachi schoolgirl who topped her class, a stay-at-home phase she calls a dark space, a couch-based reselling experiment, two funding rounds totalling five million dollars, and then a sentiment reversal that forced the company to relearn what a business is supposed to do.

Mina hails from Karachi. She did her entire schooling at PN Model School — later Bahria College — on M.T. Khan Road, never switched institutions, and remembers winning a declamation contest in year four in front of a hall of Navy cadets. “I still have that dictionary with me,” she tells Muzamil, referring to the prize. “Now I’m forty. That confidence I had as a child — I don’t think I can get it back.” It is the first instance of a pattern that runs through the conversation: Mina returning to a younger version of herself who was less afraid, and using that memory as a reference point when she doubts the present one.

”I was a top performer. Then I came home and I felt useless.”

Mina did her bachelor’s in computer science at CBM, then her MBA at the same institution while a British Petroleum internship convinced her that pure tech was not where she belonged. Indus TV and a stint at Mindshare followed. “It was very happening,” she says of those years. She was working at GroupM Pakistan as a media planner when she got married in 2007 and left her job.

The years that followed are the part of the story she does not soften. She moved with her husband first to Saudi Arabia and then to Dubai, had her son, and went into postpartum depression. “I felt useless,” she tells Muzamil. “I was a student my whole life. Internships, jobs, Indus awards, music awards — and suddenly I’m at home.” She tried teaching kindergarten in Dubai. She lasted a month. A Welsh colleague asked her, when she resigned, what she was going to do instead. “I’m gonna do something in beauty and fashion,” Mina remembers blurting out, and then walking out of the room. “I don’t know why I said it. But this is what I’m doing now, and I’m in love with it.”

Muzamil pauses here to make a personal point about his own mother — six children, an entire identity poured into raising them. “I feel a little sad that she sacrificed her life,” he says. “Her identity was just her children.” It is one of the more candid host moments in the episode. Mina agrees, but reframes it forward: “A child is just a part of your life. Your values, your career, your goals, your mission — those complete a woman. The family is a part of it. You do your thing.”

The Wix site, the dinner, and the myth that family is your first customer

Around 2014, Mina’s husband Salman suggested she try a business of her own. She resisted. “Business was for people with generational wealth — the Memon community, families who had been doing it for generations. For us, from a working class, the goal was always MNC.” She agreed to try because, as Salman put it to her, what was the worst that could happen.

The first version of Bagallery was sourced bags — Coach, Michael Kors — and a Wix website she describes without flattery. “It was pathetic. Really pathetic.” Her first sales attempt was a dinner of family friends. The folklore is that business starts with the people closest to you. Mina is direct that the folklore is wrong. “It’s not true. I had some bags, asked if they wanted to look, a few of them did, and I felt really embarrassed. They were not interested in doing business with me. Friendship is fine — beyond that, no.”

What worked instead was Facebook selling groups — she names ShEops — and Instagram. She started flying to outlet malls in Europe and the US, taking photos and videos in real time, and posting them as stories so customers could watch her source. When Huda Beauty’s first liquid lipsticks sold out in a day in Dubai, customers started asking for them by name. Mina, who had not heard of the brand, walked into Sephora, learned what it was, and began stocking it. By 2017 the company had a small Karachi-based team — including co-founder Aslam Mishra, a close family member running operations on the ground — and Bagallery ran its first real exhibition at the Royal Rodale in Karachi. It lost money. “It was a huge loss,” she says. Her husband had flown to Spain and bought too much Zara inventory. The marketing budget was ten thousand rupees, handed to Mishra to give to an influencer. Anoushey Ashraf, Sunita Marshall, and Yael Yael Sarhadi showed up anyway. “I give it to people who come in your bad days, for peanuts, literally peanuts. They came in and gave the show hype.”

What Bagallery actually is now

Muzamil presses Mina for a plain description of the business, because, as he puts it, he is the new guy and has never bought anything from her platform. The answer: an e-commerce portal, women-centric, that began with bags and shoes, added imported beauty as the growth wedge — The Ordinary, Tarte, the brands that were hard to find in Pakistan — and then pulled in local players (Unilever, L’Oreal, Hemani, Masarrat Misbah, Zero Makeup by Nabila) as the country-side maths got harder. Around 2020 it added a private label, Vibe, for fashion. The split today is roughly ninety percent women, ten percent men, mostly perfumes and shoes on the men’s side. Beauty — skincare, makeup, haircare, tools, perfume — is the forte. Fashion is seasonal.

Mina is clear about how Bagallery differs from a player like Daraz or a fashion-first house like Laam. “Laam’s scale is different. We work on seasonal basis with brands. Our main forte has always been beauty.” It is a deliberate narrowing, and it is the kind of choice that becomes legible only after the bubble bursts.

The counterfeit accusations — and what was actually happening

Muzamil raises a point that he says was circulating in influencer circles around 2019 and 2020: the suggestion that Bagallery was shipping counterfeit goods. He frames it carefully but does not let it go. “Trust is the bigger question in Pakistani e-commerce. It’s why Daraz never flew the way Souq or Amazon did.”

Mina’s answer is structural. The fakes accusation, she says, was scaremongering — but it landed because the company genuinely was not ready for the growth it was experiencing. “When our business suddenly grew, we were not ready for it. Operationally we had challenges. Orders weren’t delivering on time. Riders didn’t know how fragile and expensive the palette inside the box was, so they’d just throw it. Lipsticks would melt. But the melted lipstick was original.” She tells a story about discovering she had unknowingly sold a fake Tory Burch bag early on, driving to the customer’s house to return the money, and refusing to keep it in the catalogue. “From day one, fakes were never an option. If someone can afford a four-lakh bag, good for them. But if you’re getting a four-lakh bag for twenty thousand, please use your common sense.”

The fix, in her telling, was a public-facing one: a return to Karachi for an in-person event, Glamfest, where the website was converted into a walk-in mall and customers could pick up the products themselves. “People actually saw the products. The Ordinary, all original. That built credibility.”

Two rounds — and the part where she admits she didn’t really know what a startup was

Bagallery raised a roughly one-million-dollar pre-seed in 2020 and a four-million-dollar round in 2021. Muzamil’s interest, he says, is precisely that this is not a clever app or a deep-tech moat. It is a digitised version of the kind of multi-category store you find on any commercial street in Pakistan. “Pakistan doesn’t need very innovative ideas. Pakistan needs basics. Done well.”

Mina’s account of how the first round closed is the most disarming passage of the conversation. “Our fundraising experience was very simple and very basic,” she says, “because we didn’t even know we were a startup.” Her husband, while she was in Dubai, attended one of the Pakistani startup conferences and got introduced to a VC who liked the idea. “When you start swimming in the big sea, that’s when you find out about percentages and evaluations and this and that. A whole new world opened up.” The pandemic helped — online ordering went vertical, sales spiked, and investor appetite for Pakistani e-commerce moved up the priority list alongside fintech. The first round, she says, came “more like, in half-sleep, somebody gave it to you.”

The money went into two things: a real warehousing facility with proper assembly-line flow, and a real website. Her previous WordPress site had crashed under a White Friday campaign with two thousand concurrent users. “We were literally crying. Until then it was family-and-friends money. We put our lifetime savings into this. After the funding came, we understood — this is how it should be. You need more money. The way we were going, it was hand-to-mouth.”

She returns several times to a line that anyone who has raised will recognise: “Founders, founder vision, founder mission — that’s what matters most in funding. Because there are ups and downs in every business. The process is painful. A year, minimum. Back and forth. Data, terms and conditions, semicolons and full stops. You have to be very, very patient.”

The moment the music stopped

Muzamil walks Mina through the macro shift that defines the second half of the conversation. From 2020 to 2022 there was, in his framing, free money and a valuation game. By the end of 2022 it had flipped, and Pakistani startups began to fall like dominos. He cites Faisal Aftab telling his founders to hold off as long as they can.

Mina does not soften the impact on Bagallery. “When you’re flying high and everyone else is flying high, you put a lot of money into marketing.” Glam fairs in Karachi and Lahore. Heavy influencer spend. Then the dynamics of the country changed. “It’s difficult for consumers to buy groceries. It will not be easier for them to buy skincare and makeup. You have to sense — do I do fashion or do I eat first.”

Her response was, in her own word, fundamentals. She and Salman waived their salaries for a period. Roles that used to belong to different people were merged. Credit terms with vendors were renegotiated. The private label, which had been spreading into glasses, belts, shoes, and socks, was pulled back to what customers actually wanted. Existing inventory was sold down before any new buying. “For the last six months we’ve been constantly churning. The result is we are almost profitable now. When a bubble bursts, everyone’s senses come back. You set your foundations.”

Was raising VC the right call?

It is the question Muzamil asks her directly, having now walked her through both the up and the down. Her answer is unhedged. “Absolutely.” Her reasoning is class-based, and it is the cleanest articulation of her worldview in the episode. “In our country, there are people with generational wealth, and then there is a whole lot of talented people who don’t have generational wealth. For us, who don’t have generational wealth, it’s important that you get that push so the idea reaches more people.”

She is also clear about what changes when VC money enters the picture. Muzamil sets up the distinction — that a VC’s model is not to extract dividend from a profitable business but to multiply the invested money through scale or exit, because most of their other bets will fail. Mina accepts the framing fully. “We just want to put the profit back into the business. Scale it more. Long-term you want it to mature to a point where someone is interested in it, then you can let it go, hand it over, get your thing, and maybe start something new.” The honest part comes next: “When this whole thing was running, none of the startups were profitable. They were just playing on growth and evaluation and scale. Profitability was nowhere inside. Nobody was talking about it. Now we are.”

She is also generous about her own investors. “We were very transparent. Back to back meetings. We told them — this is where we’re starving, this is where we’ll get through, if we get this we’ll make it, if we don’t we’ll drown. They bought the idea because end of the day, no investor wants the business to fail. There are lives attached to it. Bread and butter for people.”

The import ban, and the slow tilt toward local

Muzamil raises a structural point about beauty in Pakistan: it does not really exist as a manufacturing base. Even local influencer-led skincare brands assemble in Pakistan from raw material that originates in China. When the import ban hit, even L’Oreal had to scramble to localise.

For Bagallery, the impact was material. Stock got stuck. “It would be very wrong to say it didn’t impact us,” Mina says. The response was a forced tilt toward local vendors — fashion brands, beauty brands that could produce here — and a strategic conclusion that the tilt should outlast the policy. The portfolio that started as fully imported went to fifty-fifty, then to roughly seventy-five percent local, twenty-five percent imported. “Now we want more local brands and locally-made products from Pakistan. Even if the source is Chinese, locally made is better. People are getting more aware. There is a politics to it too.”

The five-year north star: profitable growth, and the case for collaboration

When Muzamil asks Mina to name the long-term vision, she does it in three words. “Profitable growth.” Growth that does not hurt the business. Margins held. Stock investments made mindfully — not “let’s add belts, let’s add socks” because the white label permits it, but only what the consumer actually wants. “You don’t become ASOS overnight. It takes a lot of time.”

And then, possibly, collaboration. Mina is clear about the language. She does not say acquisition first, she says collaboration. “I love the concept of collaboration. I don’t believe in competition. There is always collaboration. But in our country, people are scared.” She is open to a merger with a marketplace that wants to move toward fashion — Muzamil floats the possibility, and mentions a Turkish, fashion-led organisation that was reportedly interested in Daraz at one point — provided the visions align. “If our good things go with them, and their good things come to us, why not? I don’t have the ego. If the business blooms better there, then it blooms better there. The people working in the company go into a bigger company. So many synergies.”

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes the conversation, as he often does, with the long horizon. He asks Mina, without ifs and without the demographic-dividend shortcut, what Pakistan looks like in twenty-seven years.

“Pakistan will bounce back. Pakistan has always bounced back,” she says. “There is so much talent. The startups we’ve seen when good times came — we’ve seen great startups, great ideas, scaling. We’ll be more tech-integrated, like our neighbours. We’re still a little behind. We’re not going to be that behind for long. I will see days, inshallah, when people order fuel online the way we do here. The world is becoming a global village. Ideas don’t stay separated. Ten or twelve Pakistan-based startups will be picked up internationally and merged with global companies, and we’ll go out global. We just need the right mindset. We become very negative in between. That’s wrong. Pakistan has made a lot of things possible.”

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is hard to miss. Mina Salman is not selling the boom or apologising for the bust. She is describing a business that learned, expensively and in public, what its actual fundamentals are — and a founder who learned, before the business did, that her own identity could not be subcontracted to anyone else. Muzamil signs off and reminds the comment section that the worst, by the indicators, has passed.