Why a banker of twenty years built a landscaping company and a fashion label

A Lahore childhood routed through Lusaka

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Mohsin Ahsan as a guest with more than twenty years in investment and hardcore banking, now setting up a new bank somewhere in Europe — a thread the conversation does not pull on — and, more interestingly, running two unrelated businesses: a landscaping outfit in the UAE and a fashion brand in Pakistan called Nooriya. The curiosity Muzamil sets up front is simple: how does someone sitting in Dubai fund, run and drive successful businesses for customers in Pakistan?

Before any of that, Mohsin walks through a childhood that is not the standard Karachi-to-Dubai arc. He was born in Lahore and started at Saint Anthony’s there. Around grade three or four, his father — who worked in the hospitality industry, with a diploma from Germany and time at Intercontinental Hotels — was offered a posting in Zambia. The family moved straight from Lahore to Lusaka in the mid-1980s.

Mohsin is unequivocal about what he found. “Africa, even today, I would say it’s one of the most beautiful places,” he tells Muzamil. “If I get the chance, frankly, I’d go today, happily.” The image Pakistanis carry of Africa — unsafe, disconnected, barren — does not match what he lived through. The compound was open. Doors stayed unlocked. The schools were American or British. The expatriate community was small enough that Zambians, Kenyans and Ugandans mixed openly with Pakistani and other foreign families. He went on to spend nearly six years there before returning to Pakistan via Karachi, the second city of light in his story.

The point is not nostalgia. When Muzamil asks about weather, wildlife and the sheer greenery — “I’m imagining the National Geographic phenomenon” — Mohsin uses Zambia’s landlocked geography to make a serious point about how exposure shapes a person. He left Lahore with passable English. He came back fluent, comfortable across half a dozen nationalities, and with friends now scattered from Australia to Canada to London and Dubai. That early dislocation, he implies, is the same muscle he is now using to build businesses across two countries.

Stability, capitalism, and what the older generation actually wanted

Muzamil pulls the conversation into a wider observation. When he asks his parents about their grandparents’ lives, the picture they paint sounds desperately poor by today’s standards — yet everyone in those stories seems happy. Capitalism, he argues, did extraordinary things for development but quietly ostracised anyone who did not “lust after the bigger and better.” A villager farming his own land used to be content. Today the same person is read as backward.

Mohsin is generous with his agreement and then sharpens it. “Our parents grew up under parents who’d lived through the world wars,” he says. “They’d seen dead bodies, they’d seen instability. For them, raising a child who got a job was an achievement. Being a graduate, in those times, was a blessing in disguise.” The valorisation of the stable job was not stupidity; it was a rational response to a world that had just shown itself to be unstable. The next generation, free of that fear, naturally looks at a twenty-year job and asks: how is that a life?

The exchange becomes one of the cleanest framings in the episode. “This is a moving circle,” Mohsin tells Muzamil. “You can’t scrutinise it on a five- or ten-year window. You have to look at it on a hundred-year cycle.” Both speakers land on the same idea: Gen Z is sharper because their exposure is genuinely wider, and the iPhone is no longer the dopamine hit it was on day one. The danger, Mohsin notes, is what they do with the boredom — whether they push deeper into technology and value, or simply consume the next thing.

The riba question, the fixed-percentage trap, and the fund that promised quarterly miracles

A long stretch of the conversation sits with Islamic finance, and it is here that Mohsin’s banking past does the most work.

Muzamil sets up the puzzle he has not been able to resolve. He is a proponent of sharia-compliant finance. He has hosted Asar Zaman on the topic. But he cannot reconcile the popular framing — that a friend who borrows a lakh and returns it four years later, exactly as it was, is somehow Islamic — with the basic economic reality that money loses value every year. If devaluation is nine percent annually, asking for nine percent back is, on the numbers, just preservation. Yet the moment he says it that way, friends call him a riba-monger.

Mohsin’s first move is to gently dispose of the friend. “First of all, the friend who took it for four years — don’t call him a friend,” he tells Muzamil. Then he gets to the actual point. The problem is not interest per se. The problem is the fixed percentage on a passive deposit where the saver has no idea what the underlying asset is doing. “When you don’t know what’s being done with your money, where it’s being invested, what ideology sits behind it, and you’re being paid a fixed monthly amount — that is the piece that drifts towards riba.” Investing alongside a real operating business, where someone is taking risk and you are sharing in the outcome, sits in a different category — even if the operator pays you a steady number out of profits, that is compensation for backing them when no one else would.

He then turns the lens on a far worse problem: the Pakistani public’s appetite for outright fraud disguised as investment. Muzamil walks through a real ad. A “company” promises that five lakh placed with them will return three-and-a-half lakh per quarter — roughly two hundred and eighty percent annualised. People queue up. Yet a brand offering twenty percent through a regulated structure is somehow suspicious. Mohsin’s read is direct: where the percentage feels too clean — twenty percent annual, ten lakh in, one-and-a-half lakh out — the public reads it as fixed and locks up. Where the number is absurd, they suspend the question and chase it. He remembers a fund years ago whose entire brand was built on the promise of trust-us-forever — relatives in the family put money in, two quarters of returns arrived, and by the third quarter the operators were knocking on doors asking for more. “If it’s too good to be true, it’s never. That one factor — that’s the whole thing.”

Muzamil closes the riff on a line that becomes the chapter’s thesis: stop chasing money, chase vision, create value, and the money will follow. Mohsin extends it. “When you have a job, you are one salary away from being poor. The title gives you status. People come up to you a little wider. And then suddenly something shifts at the bottom, and you realise you invested time and effort in the wrong relationships, the wrong projects, the wrong place. One thousand days is a real cycle. If you give a fundamentally good thing that time, it compounds. Definitely.”

Why a banker chose landscaping

The mechanical question Muzamil wants answered is why a finance operator with twenty years on the desk would pick landscaping. The obvious post-banking move is advisory or a brokerage — something Mohsin could do, as he puts it, in his sleep. He refused it for that exact reason.

The landscaping thesis came together from three places. Mohsin’s years in Zambia left him close to nature. Dubai, by contrast, is a city where nature has to be built artificially — a structural value-add rather than mere maintenance. And the hospitality sector, the world his father came from, needs landscaping on every property. He saw a niche where contracts were recurring, learning compounded across hotels and buildings, and profile built itself through the projects on the ground.

He set the business up under a fund called Mafco, and broadened the offer past landscaping to include swimming-pool construction and maintenance. New buildings need pools and grounds at construction; finished buildings need both maintained. The subscription side of the business comes for free once you have built the trust. Embed with a few developers, he tells Muzamil, and you are running. The next step is a digital B2C layer — an app for the consumer side of landscaping, which he believes will be a first in the category — but the current focus is firmly B2B.

Nooriya, and a Lahore family DNA he did not know he was carrying

Inside Mafco’s umbrella sits Nooriya, the Pakistani fashion label. Muzamil is openly intrigued. A hardcore finance person building a fashion brand from Dubai is not the standard playbook.

Mohsin’s path in is partly economic, partly inherited. On trips back to Pakistan he kept noticing that around seventy percent of mall floor space was occupied by fashion brands — a fact that immediately told the banker in him that the margins must support those rents. The retail spaces in Dolman City and Packages Mall are among the most expensive in the country. Combined with population, cotton supply and what he calls the “DNA” of Pakistani dressing — the refusal to show up to an event under-styled, regardless of budget — the underlying market made sense.

The personal piece is older. As a child in Lahore his grandfather used to get army uniforms staged at his factory for one of the GCC countries. Mohsin used to go along. The second generation did not pick the thread up. He did. “Whatever I have done in fashion, what I have always done is that the first two collections I have spearheaded personally,” he tells Muzamil, “not because I’m trying to make a mark, but because I enjoy it.”

Nooriya, now three years old with around 65,000 followers, has worked through almost every segment in the Pakistani fashion stack — prêt, three-piece unstitched, luxury formals — and consciously used each as a learning exercise. “Many brands that only do couture today,” Mohsin observes, “have absolutely limited understanding of how to do unstitched.” The brand is now positioned in bridal and luxury formal, with a UK company set up to take the line into Europe and the diaspora.

Building a Pakistan brand from a Dubai desk

Muzamil presses on the structural question that defines the rest of the episode: how do you actually run a business in Pakistan if you do not live there? He has just met a forty-year Dubai resident who tried to spend six months in Islamabad and gave up — staff turning up in chappals, no global baseline.

Mohsin’s answer rests on three pillars. The first is a co-founder he has known for twenty years, who shares CEO responsibilities on the ground in Pakistan and whose in-laws bring deep operational detail in the sector. The second is in-housing the production: Nooriya’s stitching is in-house, the samples are in-house, and overflow goes only to CMTs the team has worked with for two or three years. The third is presence. “When we started the brand,” Mohsin tells Muzamil, “I made sure that every two months I was there for a month at a time, then back, then there again.” He is open about why this works at all. “You are nobody without a team. If you think you can single-handedly conquer the world, that’s wrong. Even two people — but they have to be very honest and very transparent.”

He is also unsentimental about Pakistan’s unregulated economy. “An unregulated economy has its big plus sides — we forget that. Whatever the problem, there is a way around it. That, in a way, is a blessing in disguise as countrymen.” Where strict, by-the-book economies struggle through events like COVID, he argues, Pakistan’s looser ecosystem gave many people room to keep moving.

Distribution, Laam, and the part most fashion founders ignore

When Muzamil asks about Laam, Mohsin lights up. He describes Laam as one of Nooriya’s most active partners — the relationship runs through their social media company Sucell, which manages Nooriya’s account — and the tie-up has outlasted Nooriya’s exit from prêt. The point he makes through it is structural.

“Everybody thinks it’s the product,” he says. “It’s not always the product. It is your distribution network as well. That is a thing you can never put on the back burner.” Nooriya’s flexibility on production runs — twenty-four pieces, forty-eight, scaling up to four thousand if needed — was built precisely so the distribution side could be supplied at any volume the network demanded.

Muzamil offers his own framing of Laam’s bigger play: that the disruptive idea is not just distribution but an AI-driven insight layer that helps brands without design capability — the small operator who can move fabric but cannot read the next season — figure out what to make. Mohsin agrees with the strategy, but is clear that Nooriya did not use Laam that way. “We continue to focus on our own R and D. All our designs are in-house. None of it is from outside. What we capitalised on is the distribution network that Laam offered.”

He closes the section with an observation that gets to the heart of how the brand actually learns. The traffic numbers are not the signal. The signal is which customer arrives, places an order, and closes it — that is what the system learns from. Day one, he admits, the team did not know that. They assumed word-of-mouth would do the work. It does not, not on its own.

Nisma, and why the modest-wear brand stays in Dubai

The final business thread is the one Mohsin discloses live on the podcast: Nisma, a modest-wear brand launching out of the UAE in a matter of days. Muzamil sets it up with a story from a recent Saudi trip — his wife asked him for an abaya, he fell into a designer rabbit hole, and he discovered an entire aesthetic ecosystem of off-white, off-light-brown, modern-Islamic dressing that was visibly converting young women into hijab.

Nisma is Mohsin’s bet on exactly that current. It combines abayas with fusion pieces — including trench coats, for which he is onboarding a Western designer — targeted at both the GCC market and outbound travellers heading West in summer. The first collection is all in black, all handcrafted, all done in Dubai with Japanese fabric. There is no ready stock; every abaya is stitched to order with a four-to-five-day lead time.

Muzamil pushes the obvious counter. If Nooriya’s whole proposition is that Pakistan gives you margin, why not do Nisma the same way — design in Dubai, sew in Lahore? Mohsin’s answer is the cleanest articulation in the episode of what he actually learned in banking. “The customer is going to be very comfortable when she can pick up the phone in the morning and talk to somebody who is responsible for her dress, and not only that — in the second half of the day, that same person can go and meet her. That builds something which is called trust. Brand is all about trust.” A Pakistan back end cannot service that promise. If a complaint has to be solved the same day, or a replacement the next, that has to be local. Banking taught him one thing, he tells Muzamil — it is all about customer satisfaction. Nooriya is built for the Pakistani customer; Nisma is built, end-to-end, for the GCC one.

Two decades of Pakistan, seen from outside

Muzamil closes by asking Mohsin to look back. He has been in the Gulf for more than twenty years — he arrived around the Y2K bug, though he doubts most people remember it now — and has kept going back to Pakistan throughout. What has actually changed?

Muzamil sets up his own father’s despondency for context: a senior banker who once saw a phone as a luxury and a fridge as an event, who now lives in a country where consumer electronics have finally crossed into mass-market homes. The despondency, his father had told him, ignored the development. Mohsin agrees, but reaches for smaller, more specific examples.

“On my recent trip we had somebody who had to use a wheelchair,” he tells Muzamil, “and even in remote areas we found accessibility. That is a very big factor — places where there wasn’t even a sign of a public toilet before.” He describes a gol-gappa cart in Islamabad where the vendor served on plastic plates, with plastic spoons, wearing gloves. “That is a sight I didn’t think I would see in Pakistan.” He talks about local burger joints out-performing KFC in some neighbourhoods, about Chaman ice cream once being the only name in town and now sitting next to “unlimited” local brands across food and clothing. “The human mind has a habit of stretching the negative and treating the positive as ‘what’s the big deal, it happens everywhere.’ I don’t think that is fair.”

The other half of his answer is honest about what Pakistan has lost. When Muzamil asks why Pakistan has not globalised its economy the way Bangladesh has — fisheries to a hundred-billion-dollar export economy with double the GDP per capita — Mohsin does not blame any one community or any one era. He talks about identity drifting, focus shifting to things that were not industries, and a country that began breaking itself into ever-smaller silos: city, district, caste, village. He acknowledges, when Muzamil pushes back with the point that India contains the same silos and still exports at scale, that vision still exists in Pakistan but does not show, and people no longer talk about it the way they once did. Fear factors, real and imagined, do the rest of the damage.

He ends on the hundred-year cycle he began with. Grandparents who saw war taught their children to take stable jobs. That generation taught Mohsin’s generation to look for more than a job. Gen Z is looking for something else again. The next generation will look for yet another thing. “It’s a slow process. In some countries it’s faster. In ours it’s slow. But we will get there.”

Muzamil wraps the conversation at the one-hour-forty mark, after thanking Mohsin for the disclosure of Nisma and saying he is genuinely curious to see how the modest-fashion bet plays out.