The slow brand: how Manto was built without a plan

Sleeping through school, acting through life

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Salman Masood Parekh — founder of Manto — as someone the audience had been requesting for a long time. What follows is not a polished origin story. It is something more honest.

Salman grew up in Karachi and spent the better part of his early education in a مدرسہ, where his parents hoped he would memorise the Quran. He did not. What he did instead was sleep — standing up, sitting down, mid-recitation — to the point where teachers invented rules specifically to keep him awake. “وو مجھ جیسے بچوں کی وجہ سے یہ rule invent ہوا,” he says, describing how the practice of swaying while reading was introduced because of students like him.

But the مدرسہ gave him something the school system never quite managed: exposure to people from every economic background, and a first taste of performance. An annual programme gave him a small acting role. The applause that followed became, in his telling, a self-fulfilling prophecy. “جب آپ ہکیقت سمجھ لیتے ہیں آپ اس کے بارے میں اور سوچتے ہیں — and then you start thinking more and more about it and it’s such a self-fulfilling prophecy.” He wanted to become an actor.

He moved to mainstream school in eighth grade, failed, changed schools, failed Urdu in metric, changed colleges three times during intermediate, and eventually took a gap year. His parents — particularly his father, who had built his own business from scratch — held the line without breaking him. When a path opened to study abroad, he took it.

The content creator who lost his voice

Before university, Salman had already started making videos — first on YouTube, then on Facebook when YouTube was banned in Pakistan. He and Muzamil got to know each other around 2011, at a time when neither of them was doing it for money or fame. “We genuinely — آپ فنکارتے. میرے پاس ایک camera تھا میں اس کو explore کرنا چاہتا تھا.”

The reach was real. Four hundred thousand views at a time when content distribution was thin meant most of Pakistan had seen your work. People would stop Salman on the street.

Then he moved to the UK for university, and it all stopped. In a new country where nobody knew him, he sat in front of a camera for an hour one day and could not finish a single sentence. “For one hour I could not finish a sentence and that was the most difficult time in my content creation journey.” The identity he had built — the person who made videos — had evaporated. What replaced it was a quieter, more filtered version of himself that suppressed not just the bad ideas but the good ones too.

Muzamil, speaking from his own experience, notes that the numbers on social media function like a drug: “It’s designed for that.” The withdrawal, when it comes, is real. For Salman, the dip in attention coincided with being in a foreign country, academically adrift, and watching his own ideas get replicated by others on Pakistani channels. By 2015 and 2016, his self-esteem had collapsed. “اپنے آپ کی نظر کے اندر گرنا سب سے بڑی ہار ہے — کیونکہ دنیا آپ کو کچھ بھی بولے، آپ کو گرا دے، لیکن اگر آپ اپنی خود کی نظروں کے اندر جب گر جاتے ہیں تو اٹھنا بہت زیادہ مشکل ہوتا ہے۔“

The masters, the wedding, and the comeback

The turnaround came from an unlikely source: a TED Talk by Adam Grant on original thinkers, watched at 4AM during one of his lowest points. It reframed everything he had been ashamed of — the strange ideas, the inability to follow convention — as potential strengths rather than defects.

He enrolled in a masters in e-business management at the University of Warwick. He also told the admissions head that his wedding date and his thesis deadline were the same day, and that he intended to do both. The head told him the last person who tried that did not make it. Salman took it as a challenge.

He submitted his thesis at 7:47AM on 25 August 2017, tears running down his face, no time to wipe them. He secured a distinction across seven of eight subjects. “وہ زندگی کا والا moment ہو رہا تھا جس کے اندر آپ ٹوٹ کر واپس بن رہے تھے۔” He flew out the same week to get married.

A bout of shingles during the masters led to a conversation with a senior faculty member who walked him through a breathing exercise. Salman recognised it as something he already had access to: prayer. He returned to نماز, and describes the سجدہ as the most effective form of meditation he has found. “جتنا masters کی پڑھائی نے سکھایا اور benefit کیا اس سے بہت زیادہ I believe کہ اس particular side of thing نے آپ کی clarity of thought — to keep you grounded — اس کے اندر بہت زیادہ help کیا۔“

Quitting content, finding the idea

Back in Pakistan in 2017, married, with a distinction from a British university, Salman tried to restart content creation. It was not working — not because the audience was gone, but because he was performing a version of himself that no longer felt true. Muzamil told him directly to stop. “سلمان، you are a different person and the videos that you are putting out — that’s not you. So while you’re fooling yourself, while you’re carrying this on, take a break.”

He went to Hajj shortly after. When he came back, he shut down his social media entirely. He posts roughly once a year now. The break, he says, gave him back the space to think clearly about multiple interests rather than collapsing everything into one identity.

The idea for Manto had been forming quietly since his time in the UK, where he had started wearing کرتا شلوار and found himself asking why it was not considered cool. “میں نے کہا یہ cool کیوں نہیں لگ رہا ہے؟” He wanted to re-engineer it — better fabric, better cut, stretchable where it had never been stretchable before. He had no background in fashion, textile, or manufacturing. He spent six to seven months walking through fabric markets in Karachi with a colleague, learning what کپڑا was, how stitching worked, what CMT units did.

150,000 rupees, 40 dresses, and a CMT unit that doubled its rates

The first test run cost around 150,000 rupees. Salman had 40 dresses stitched — only 10 of them fully finished, so he could photograph them — and would stitch to order as requests came in. The early customers were the kind who always want to try something new first. He asked every one of them for feedback. When something was wrong, he took it back, fixed it, and returned it.

The first major investment — one million rupees from his father, after Salman presented a case study — went into 540 pieces of fabric. Then the CMT unit he had found, once it had cut all the fabric and held it as collateral, raised its rates by 50 percent. Salman was stuck. He negotiated his way out by promising future business, got the pieces finished, and walked away having learned the most important early lesson of the business: trust is the only currency that matters, and you find out who has it only when you are vulnerable.

“گلط لوگوں کے ملنے سے آپ کو سہی لوگوں کا پتہ چل جاتا ہے۔ گلط کام کے ہونے سے آپ کو سہی کام کا پتہ ہو جاتا ہے۔”

Later, people inside the company were running their own side dealings with suppliers. More losses, more lessons.

Bisma’s designs and the shift from basics to brand

The plain کرتا شلوار was a starting point, not a destination. The creative shift came from Salman’s wife, Bisma, who had always been an artist but had not pursued it formally. She took short courses in digital artwork and textile design — two to three months each — and produced a set of designs for an assignment themed around Urdu.

Salman asked her to apply those designs to dupattas and shawls that customers could pair with Manto’s basics. Six months of searching for the right printing factory followed. When they found one — export-standard, run by someone with a textile engineering background — and Bisma’s designs went into production, the response changed everything.

Actors and public figures began buying the pieces with their own money and wearing them publicly. Designs that Bisma had once wondered whether they were good enough to get her hired at a big brand became, in Salman’s words, “a national integrated part of fashion.” The self-doubt she had carried — would any of the established brands even select her? — was answered by the market itself.

What a brand actually is

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Salman to explain what building a brand actually means — particularly for young people starting e-commerce businesses who want to replicate what Manto has done without understanding what produced it.

Salman’s answer is precise. A brand is trust. Nothing more, nothing less. “Nothing damages a brand more than failing to fulfill its promises.” His university professor, who had consulted for Louis Vuitton and Amazon, had told him that. The mechanics of trust are the same whether you are selling a pen or a کرتا: make a promise, then keep it. If you cannot keep it perfectly, keep trying visibly and honestly.

The second mistake most new brands make, he says, is trying to be for everyone from day one. “It’s not the time of masses, it’s the time of niche.” Manto found its early community not through advertising but through specific circles — doctors, academics, journalists, women who had built something in their lives — who wore it, recommended it, and brought others in. The Tipping Point dynamic: small, trusted nodes spreading something outward.

The third principle is the smallest viable audience. If ten people buy your product and none of them come back or tell a friend, no amount of scaling will fix that. “What makes you think کہ اگر دس لوگوں میں ایک چیز نہیں چل رہی، سو لوگوں میں نہیں چل رہی تو ہزار لوگوں میں چل جائے گی؟” The answer is in the iteration, not the volume.

Muzamil draws the parallel to his own podcast, which grew entirely through word of mouth. Salman confirms it: he had seen strangers stop Muzamil in a car park to say they listened. That is what organic growth looks like before you layer any paid strategy on top.

Five years out: slow, international, and honest about imperfection

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks about the five-year vision for Manto. Salman is characteristically measured. He does not want a flagship mall store as a vanity milestone. He wants to test international markets properly — the UK warehousing through a third-party logistics partner is already live, UAE has a localised website, and the US and Australia are next in line. But only when the infrastructure can support the same returns and exchange experience that Pakistani customers get.

“Do it once, do it right,” he says. Not because you cannot learn from failure, but because premature scale has killed more brands than slow growth ever has.

He closes with something closer to a public commitment than a marketing statement: Manto is not perfect, has not always been perfect, and will make mistakes. But the intention is to stay honest about those mistakes, admit them, and keep improving. “ہم کل کے بچے ہیں۔ We are on a journey, we are trying and testing.”

Muzamil ends the episode with a straightforward endorsement — and a promise of a second conversation, because an hour and a half at 2AM barely touched the surface of what Salman knows about marketing and brand building. The invitation stands.