Why Krave Mart won't lay off anyone for 18 months

From army school topper to extracurricular dropout

The episode opens with Haziq Ahmed describing a childhood split between two very different schools in Karachi. Up to fifth grade he was a consecutive topper at an army-style school — a product, he says, of his mother’s strict enforcement rather than any intrinsic love of studying. When he transferred to Civil Aviation School, a school that had produced national-level hockey players, he encountered facilities he had never seen: basketball courts, table tennis, badminton, a band room. He enrolled in everything simultaneously.

“I sort of manipulated them — they couldn’t get track of how many things I got enrolled into,” he tells Muzamil. The result was predictable: four papers failed out of eight in his first term. The school change had exposed him to extracurricular life at exactly the moment his mother assumed the hard work was done.

The pattern repeated at college. He attended Marie Kent College but, by his own admission, “shayad hi koi class li ho” — he was barely present. Cricket camps, a band, and the general intoxication of early mobile phones consumed him. He passed eventually, but only after a tutor — himself a struggling chartered accountancy student — rebuilt his relationship with learning through incentivisation rather than punishment. Biology sessions were followed by cricket. The tutor spent two and a half hours on problems that should have taken one. Haziq passed matric with A-plus grades.

The textile education that actually stuck

His father, a self-made man who had joined PIA on a father-son quota after losing his own father at sixteen, connected Haziq with a supplier who pointed him toward the Textile Institute of Pakistan. The BBA in apparel manufacturing and merchandising was, Haziq explains to Muzamil, designed to fill a gap the industry had long ignored: factories could produce, but nobody knew how to sell.

“The professors who taught technical courses were all from industry,” he says. “If I had studied properly, I don’t think Manchester would have taught me as much as here.” He failed textile 101 in his first semester — the fiber science was too chemistry-heavy — but by his final year he had launched his own small brand. At his annual dinner, at least seven people were wearing shirts he had made himself.

He also used the time to understand the structural problem with his family’s buying-house business. Manufacturers were vertically integrating. The middleman’s margin was shrinking. “If you are retail, you are the king,” he concluded. “You control the price.” That insight would take years to fully act on, but it was already formed before he graduated.

He also shared a detail that surprised Muzamil: Pakistan leads the world in denim wash research and development. “China and India don’t come close,” Haziq says. The work was driven largely by TIP graduates who persuaded companies to invest in the right machinery, which in turn attracted orders from Wrangler and the who’s who of global denim.

Manchester, £2.50, and knocking a hundred doors a day

Haziq applied to Manchester — the Harvard of textile universities, as he describes it — and was rejected twice before being accepted in 2011 into a new programme in international fashion retailing. He arrived and immediately ran two tracks in parallel: his studies and a custom clothing business serving the South Asian diaspora.

The business model was elegant. He would attend exhibitions, hang QR codes on sample garments offering one free item by lottery, collect leads, then take bespoke orders back to his manufacturing unit in Pakistan. A dress that cost him five thousand rupees all-in — including overnight delivery — he sold for five hundred pounds. “The margin was such that I don’t even know how to tell you,” he says.

Then Karachi’s security situation deteriorated. Artisans from Orangi Town stopped coming to work. His brother had to relocate the small factory twice. The business wound down.

What followed was the episode’s most striking passage. Haziq found himself living in a friend’s kitchen in Manchester, eating expired Asda sandwiches, with £2.50 in his bank account and his dissertation still unsubmitted. He walked ten kilometres to a sales company that was hiring people to knock doors and sign up charity subscribers in minus-two-degree hailstorms.

“On every door there is an opportunity. But you have to give a hundred percent. Every single time, no matter the hailstorm, no matter the circumstances.” He became a team lead. He also ran for general secretary of the University of Manchester student union — the first green-passport holder to contest the election, he believes — came within 280 votes of winning, and was disqualified on a technicality he still disputes.

Thirteen years in retail: from kpade to Alkaram

Back in Pakistan by 2013, Haziq spent the next several years inside the country’s fashion retail industry. He joined a brand called Kpade as brand manager, then moved to Zealbury, a Primark-style value brand being built by the same group. He describes the owner, Faisal, as “super street smart, great in negotiations.”

The most consequential stop was Alkaram. When he arrived, the brand was perceived as old — associated with women over fifty. He and a colleague, Nabil Bawani, convinced the owners that the brand had structural muscle — financial strength, name recognition — but needed small, precise changes. Haziq’s single most visible contribution was persuading them to remove the double lines from the logo. “Just get rid of the double lines and you are instantly perceived as a sleek, cool brand.”

He joined when there were sixteen outlets. He left after the launch of the forty-third. By that point the business was doing roughly one and a half billion rupees in revenue. He had learned, he tells Muzamil, what it takes to convert a family-owned company into a corporate one — a problem he sees across Pakistan’s legacy textile sector.

Food panda: from 800 riders to 13,000 in three months

In 2019, Haziq made what he calls a jarring switch — from thirteen years in textile retail to head of logistics at food panda Pakistan. The company had 800 riders and 4,000 orders a day across seven or eight cities. Within three months, his team had built the rider network to 13,000. Within eight to nine months, order volume crossed 100,000 per day.

The next bottleneck after logistics was vendor density. Pakistan had almost no restaurant chains — “maybe five or ten brands with any kind of chain, otherwise everyone is individual.” Haziq proposed building a home chef vertical: home cooks onboarded as vendors. It was the first such vertical originated from Pakistan for the global food panda network, built bottom-up rather than top-down. Within its first year it became eight percent of total business and the first vertical to reach gross-profit positivity.

He also makes a point Muzamil finds striking: food panda’s average rider earned more than a junior accountant. “If you go to hire someone on articleship — part-qualified, that type — he gets paid less than our average rider.” He is careful not to romanticise the gig economy, acknowledging fraud on both the rider and customer sides, but he pushes back on the exploitation narrative with specificity rather than sentiment.

What Krave Mart is actually building

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Haziq to explain Krave Mart plainly. The company went live on 1 December 2021, after raising money in October of that year. It operates in Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi — not Islamabad, because real estate economics there do not yet support a dark store.

The surface product is quick commerce: grocery delivery in ten to thirty minutes. But Haziq is direct about what the company is actually building. “It’s the logistic warehousing infrastructure,” he says. “Which is essentially going to be integrated with a lot of other products.” Grocery is the entry point because it drives frequency and builds customer habit. The long-term play is fulfillment-as-a-service for any e-commerce player that wants last-mile reach in a given zone.

The unit economics argument is where Haziq is most precise. “Just to give you a comparison: if our competitor needs 2,000 orders to reach GP positivity at a single store, we need 250.” The gap comes from decisions made before launch — rent-to-sale ratios, payroll-to-sale ratios, variable versus fixed cost structures. Krave Mart has also deployed AI-based camera surveillance in its dark stores to track picker movement and catch shrinkage without adding auditors or guards.

On the question of whether quick commerce is a viable long-term business, Haziq points to global consolidation as evidence that serious capital understands the infrastructure thesis. “DoorDash bought Flink. Delivery Hero bought Gorillas. These were two- and three-billion-dollar valuations. They are not stupid.” The current global downturn is producing corrections, he argues, not invalidations.

The rider welfare question and the gig economy

Muzamil raises a pointed question about gig workers — specifically the Indian MP who argued that ten-minute delivery forces riders to rush through traffic. Haziq’s response is operational rather than ideological.

“Drive time doesn’t make any difference. Your zonal marking makes all the difference.” A 2 to 2.5 kilometre zone means six to seven minutes of drive time under normal traffic conditions. Two minutes for picking, one minute for handover, one minute for dispatch. “Total operation remains the same whether you do it in four kilometres or two and a half. The question is where you place your store.”

He is more candid about the broader gig economy debate. He has met riders who used food panda income to open their own restaurants and onboard them as vendors. He has met couples where the husband rode and the wife cooked as a home chef. “The downside gets seen a lot. The upside is never seen.” He adds that he is not preaching — “Krave Mart is my company, not food panda” — but insists that food panda paved the way for the entire ecosystem and deserves respect for it.

Pakistan in 2050, and what actually needs to change

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Haziq the question he puts to every guest: what does Pakistan look like in 2050? Haziq is the only guest in recent memory to decline the frame entirely.

“I don’t see Pakistan in 2050. I don’t look that far. I say: what do I have to do today? How do I do it right today?” He is not pessimistic — he believes Pakistan has everything it needs to become one of the world’s powerful nations. International VCs are ready to invest. The talent is there. What is missing, he argues, is morality. Not capital, not infrastructure, not even policy. “Wherever there is drama, wherever there is fraud, wherever there is two-numberi — it’s a Pakistani. That is why they treat us the way they do.”

His prescription is simple and unromantic: keep your head down, build real skills, do not look for passive shortcuts, do not compromise on integrity. “Allah tallah has no jugaad. No references. You apply, you go through eight or ten assessments, and then you get recruited.”

Muzamil closes by telling Haziq that this is the first time his view on quick commerce has genuinely changed — not just updated, but reversed. It is a rare admission from a host who has spent two and a half hours stress-testing every claim. The conversation earns it.