Why Pakistan's next unicorn ships from a warehouse, not a website

A return guest and a different LAM

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation as part of the ongoing series with Endeavor Pakistan — a hunt for the fifty most interesting startups in the country. Arif Iqbal, founder and CEO of LAM, has been on the show before, but the company he runs today is not the company he described last time. Muzamil names the change directly: on a recent trip to the US, every conversation about a Pakistani wedding or an Eid order kept circling back to one brand. “Every person I spoke to,” he says, “every person just flat out only talks about LAM.”

Arif lays out the current scale in plain numbers. LAM supports over two thousand sellers. It has shipped Pakistani product to more than two million customers across one hundred-plus countries and 7,500 cities. By his framing, that makes LAM the largest consumer-shipment player out of Pakistan. The model has consolidated since the last conversation: LAM no longer runs a made-to-order tail. Everything that goes live is warehoused first. The warehouse holds over half a million units at any given time — close to 80,000 live SKUs, with around 300,000 unique SKUs across the rotating catalogue.

The split between domestic and international has tilted. “Approximately sixty-five percent of the units we sell are outside of Pakistan,” Arif says. A year ago that number was closer to sixty. The international growth has simply outpaced the domestic — which is, in the end, the entire thesis of the company.

What the new tariff regime actually does to a Pakistani exporter

Muzamil moves the conversation to the policy question hanging over global e-commerce: the unwinding of the de minimis rule that let small parcels into the US duty-free. Arif separates two timelines. The China-specific tariff hit roughly six months earlier. The broader rule — ending de minimis for the entire world — was announced just days before the recording, with country-specific rates layered on top. India’s rate sits at fifty percent. Pakistan’s at nineteen. Some other countries at fifteen.

Arif is calm about the impact on LAM. South Asian clothing, he argues, does not have ready substitutes in the destination market. “The product that we are selling, we are targeting South Asian clothing, and the majority of the time there is not a lot of alternates available,” he says. A small price uplift will not collapse demand for a wedding outfit a buyer cannot get elsewhere.

What he is more interested in is the opportunity the tariff differential opens up in Western fashion. Where a category has many origins, the tariff arithmetic becomes a sharp competitive lever. A nineteen-percent Pakistani rate against a thirty-percent rate elsewhere is an eleven-point advantage. Against India’s fifty, it is more than thirty. “A very major competitive advantage comes to a place where the tariff is going to be a bit lower,” he says. LAM has a team watching this daily, working with couriers, and preparing to absorb whatever percentage hit the policy lands on. His view is straightforward: the tariffs are coming, they will hit e-commerce, and the business has to be ready.

The five-business-day floor

Muzamil presses on logistics. The conversation has been here before, and last time Arif gave a number for cross-border shipment cost that Muzamil remembers as shocking. The follow-up question is what those numbers look like now, and what an optimised cross-border supply chain out of Pakistan actually looks like in practice.

Arif begins with the consumer side. The definition of “fast” has collapsed over the last decade. Amazon set a new floor, and the global consumer has internalised it. “Anything above ten days, it’s like, okay, I would rather not buy,” he says. LAM’s internal target is a five-business-day average across the entire world, with a plus-or-minus three-day standard deviation. Some Dubai orders deliver in twenty-four hours. Some far-flung markets stretch to eight or nine days. The internal goal is to grind that average from seven down to six, from six down to five.

The other variable is cost. Arif is sharp about the relationship between the two: optimise one too aggressively and you fail. The first thing LAM had to figure out was the consumer’s willingness to pay. Their research put the ceiling at twenty percent of the order value. Above that, carts get abandoned. Below that, there is room to manoeuvre — and the question becomes how to bring delivery in as fast as possible inside that budget.

Air shipments, forward deployment, and the bulk-break model

The technical heart of the conversation is how Arif describes the two structural options for cross-border e-commerce shipping. The first is forward deployment: take the entire inventory, divide it across destination hubs — half to the East Coast, half to the West Coast in the US case — and ship from there. The second is the bulk-break model. Aggregate hundreds of shipments into a single port-to-port move, then split them apart on arrival. Both are about economies of scale. Five shipments cost fifty dollars each. Fifty shipments cost forty. A hundred-plus brings the per-unit cost down further.

LAM uses bulk-break, working with partners — Skynet, DHL, FedEx — rather than building its own logistics arm. The volume has reached the point where it works. UK, Canada, Dubai, US — these are markets where LAM’s break-bulk model is deployed. Dubai delivers within forty-eight hours, guaranteed. The average international order on LAM contains eight items. The combined effect, Arif says, is that the company has brought its average shipping cost down by roughly fifty percent against the prevailing market rate — to “around thirty-ish dollars or so” per order.

He is also clear about why LAM has not become a logistics player itself. Pakistan has a structural problem: traffic is one-way. Return packages cannot easily be brought back. “It’s very hard for the traffic to be two way,” he says. That single fact reshapes the entire model. It is also why air shipments make more sense than sea for the online order flow. Sea shipping is for forward deployment of inventory. Air carries the on-demand orders, and post-COVID expansion in global airline cargo capacity has made it cheaper than it used to be. Emirates Post, Arif notes, has emerged as a serious player on the back of exactly this dynamic.

Reverse-engineering Shein

Muzamil asks the question that has been sitting under the surface of the entire discussion: how did the Chinese e-commerce giants get their per-parcel costs so low? Arif’s answer is the longest single passage in the conversation, and worth following carefully because it is unusually concrete.

Shein, he says, published a document at one point requiring any partner logistics company to dedicate at least two planes to its volume. That alone tells you the order of magnitude. With hundreds of tons of cargo and an entire plane booked port-to-port, the maths inverts. LAM’s team reverse-engineered the flow by ordering Shein parcels and tracing the delivery chain. Some of the trucks that arrived in the US bore no logo recognisable to either USPS or any of the usual carriers. “These are not USPS,” Arif says. “There are no companies. They got that to the port and they had worked out a way.”

The three-part structure he describes is: warehouse to port inside China, where infrastructure is now strong; port to port, where China Post negotiated rates that ordinary shippers cannot get; and port to last-mile, where USPS hands a parcel to a buyer for two and a half dollars because the partner is moving millions of orders a day. Shein, on his read, ran RFPs for new last-mile providers wherever USPS would not negotiate below four dollars. New companies emerged specifically to bid for the volume. Government support — China Post acting as a national multiplier — sits underneath the entire structure.

The implication for Pakistan is the second half of the argument. There is no Pakistan Post equivalent doing this work. The aggregation has to come from the private sector. Aggregating through Dubai works for some destination clusters. Thailand makes sense for others. Oman Air’s expansion opens a new hub. LAM and its partners are running these calculations on a monthly basis. The benefit, Arif says, is that the same aggregation that LAM built for its own marketplace is now being offered to other Pakistani businesses through Octane.

Octane, and what infrastructure actually means

Muzamil moves the conversation to LAM’s second product. Octane is the technology infrastructure that LAM itself runs on — storefront, order management, inventory, customer management, the whole stack. It was opened up to other businesses last year, and now powers over a hundred external sellers.

Arif corrects a framing partway through: “I am not using the words only SaaS. I am using the word infrastructure. It provides the technology and the physical infrastructure.” That distinction is the point. A Pakistani seller does not just need a Shopify-like front end. They need someone to take physical custody of the inventory, scan it in, place it dynamically on a shelf, allocate it to an order in real time, and route it through the correct international shipping partner — without the seller ever touching the operational complexity.

The walkthrough Arif gives is detailed enough to be quoted. A seller uploads a product, gets a barcode generated by Octane, prints it, and tags the units. A button in the app — labelled RFP, for request for pickup — summons a car. The car scans the units at the door, checks packaging compliance, and brings them to the warehouse, where they get scanned in again. A dynamic slotting system, modelled on Amazon’s approach, lets the warehouse use every inch of available space rather than fixed locations. Two minutes after a scan, the unit is live on the website. When an order arrives, an iPad notification routes a picker through an optimised path; the algorithm prints the shipping label; the parcel ships. There is, Arif notes, an unexpected benefit on the fraud side: every step is video-recorded with synchronised timestamps. When a buyer claims items were missing, LAM sends them the warehouse footage. “Ninety percent of claims fall silent right there.”

The thesis Arif keeps returning to is about the kind of seller LAM is actually built for. Emerging-market sellers, in his view, are typically strong at two things: creative product development and production. Everything else — global storefronts, logistics, inventory management, currency-aware pricing, last-mile reconciliation — is where they give up. “We have seen our housewives having one or two stitchers in their houses,” he says, “and now they are operating factories of three hundred, four hundred people.” Take the abstraction away, and that growth path closes.

A worked example: the planner business that could not go global

Later in the discussion, Muzamil gives a personal example. In 2017 he and his wife built an e-commerce brand selling planners and diaries — locally manufactured in Lahore, retailing for around eight to ten dollars in Pakistan, where similar products in Western markets sell for roughly fifty. International queries kept coming in from Australia, the US, Canada. He looked at Amazon’s third-party warehouses, looked at the cost of forward-deploying inventory across multiple regions as a tiny enterprise with no visibility into where demand would land, and concluded it was not workable.

This is the precise problem Octane is designed to solve. Arif walks through it directly. The seller pushes three thousand planners through the RFP button. A car arrives. The inventory is live across one hundred-plus countries within hours. A customer in the US orders eight units. The shipping cost, instead of fifty dollars on a ten-dollar product, comes down — by Arif’s example — to roughly two dollars per planner because of the eight-item average and the bulk-break partners. Dynamic pricing, reseller and affiliate models, and AI-driven storefront optimisation by region are layered on top. None of it requires the seller to learn it. “Just click on a button, build my page through AI,” Arif says. The point is to abstract the undifferentiated work so the seller can focus on the next version of the product.

Profitability, $5.5 million raised, and a deliberate 2026 opening

Muzamil asks about funding. LAM raised $5.5 million last year, led by global investors with one local participant — ZenBC, run by a Pakistani founder operating between Pakistan and the US. Next year, Arif says, the company will raise a much larger round, principally to fund Octane’s growth alongside LAM’s.

The business is profitable. Not just gross-margin positive, but EBITDA positive — meaning, in Arif’s words, “we are not burning investor money anymore.” He is careful not to overclaim the headline number. EBITDA, he points out, is a function of how much you are willing to spend on growth. The position he wants LAM to be in is one where it can be aggressive on growth while keeping its head above water.

There is a philosophical thread here he names directly. Living in Seattle for a long stretch of his life, he absorbed Amazon’s idea of frugality. “It’s great to be frugal,” he says. The 2022–2023 era of startup excess, in his framing, is something he has actively studied — looking at the wrong decisions made and how to avoid them. LAM, he reminds Muzamil, supports more than two thousand SMEs and the fifteen thousand people they employ. The downside of running out of runway is not just his own.

The waitlist Muzamil flagged on the Octane site is intentional. Arif’s view is that the technology can scale faster than the physical infrastructure. The warehouse needs to be ready to handle four to five million units when the moment the gate opens. He puts the timing on the record: 2026 is when Octane opens up at scale.

Endeavor, and a 2030 target stated plainly

Toward the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Arif to explain what Endeavor actually is, since it is not a VC, not a fund, and does not take equity. Arif’s answer is personal. He was approached by Endeavor Pakistan around two and a half years ago, in their early launch period, and admits he was sceptical. It took a vouch from a peer entrepreneur he respected to get him to take the process seriously. Fifteen interviews followed — five of them with unicorn founders he had never spoken to in his life. Since being accepted, the network has produced specific results: an ex-Louis Vuitton CXO offering mentor sessions on building a global fashion business, top-tier logistics introductions in the UAE arranged in a week, and the lead investor on LAM’s latest round — Aatif of disrupt.com, an Endeavor Pakistan board member who had originally interviewed him.

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question he likes to ask all of his startup guests: where is LAM in 2030? Arif’s answer is specific. He wants hundreds of millions of customers globally served through what LAM has built. Hundreds of thousands of businesses supported. Those businesses employing multimillion jobs on the ground. “If this is able to come true,” he says, “I truly believe we are able to create an organisation which could be worth tens of billions of dollars.”

Muzamil closes by saying what he rarely says about Pakistani startups. He is, as a rule, cautiously optimistic about companies built for the local market — because the local market has structural problems no founder can fix. LAM is the exception. Its DNA is exports. It is bringing dollars in rather than rotating a shrinking rupee pie. “For me, LAM is in the top three of the first emerging unicorns out of Pakistan,” he says. The rest is a question of speed.