Why Pakistan's western wear market is the next $5B prize

The industry no one is excited about — and the one quietly worth billions

The episode opens with Muzamil framing a paradox. Of all the consumer categories in Pakistan, fashion is the one almost everyone interacts with daily and almost no one talks about as exciting. The assumption is that the space is mature, that the big players are already entrenched, that further growth will be marginal. Muzamil pushes back on that read directly. “The richest man in the world was in the fashion industry, in luxury fashion,” he says. The category has clear economic gravity; the question is whether Pakistan has the consumer base to capture it.

He sets the numbers up front. By the studies he cites, the total addressable market for western wear in Pakistan sits somewhere between forty and ninety million adults depending on where one draws the consumer-class line. Revenue potential for 2025 lands between one and two and a half billion dollars — roughly two hundred and fifty to three hundred billion rupees. Extrapolated over the next decade, the category is projected to grow to around five billion dollars. “People don’t even realise what the landscape will look like ten years from now,” Muzamil says. That is the conversation he wants to have with Muneeb Zafar, founder of Fitted, who has spent the last eight years building toward exactly that curve.

A semester in Canada, and the decision to come home

Muneeb’s path is unusual for the founder demographic in this category. Born in Rawalpindi to a government-service family, schooled in Lahore at Beaconhouse, he started at LACAS but had already applied for a Canadian student visa. The visa came through for the January intake and he flew out. Six months later, on summer break, he decided not to go back.

The reasoning is precise and worth listening to. “I just realised, you know, ok ‒ I’m doing undergrad, and my ambitions in life were obviously always more towards entrepreneurship,” he says. The classmates around him were settling in to stay forever. If staying forever was the plan, the cost made sense. If coming back was the plan, the cost did not. He came home, enrolled at FC College, and graduated in 2015 in business management.

The frame he gives the decision is one he still recommends to people considering the same call. “I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. Pakistan has immense value in it. Pakistan has immense potential.” He notes that of the relatively small percentage of Pakistanis who complete undergraduate education, an even smaller fraction master a domain — and that funnel is the real opportunity. The pool shrinks fast at the top, and that is where the room is.

Bricks.pk, Brammers, and the salesman who didn’t want to be a salesman

The first job out of FC College was at Bricks.pk, a real-estate startup in the early Zameen.com era. Muneeb was one of their first hires and his job was door-to-door sales. He says it plainly: he never enjoyed it, and at the time he was constantly applying elsewhere. Looking back, he calls it one of the most profound experiences of his life.

The reason matters. “Many big marketing companies, even worldwide, use branding, advertising and sales interchangeably,” he says. “But sales is the foundation of everything.” He compresses the role of a CEO into two jobs — do the sales, and do the product development. Everything else, in his telling, falls into place if those two are working. High rent, expensive resources, external shocks, climate change, none of it matters as long as sales are healthy. The second leg — repeat customers — is what he calls the backbone of any business. The North Star metric of the major companies he respects is, in his framing, repeat customers.

The second job was at Brammers, a 360-degree digital agency at the peak of its run. Muneeb was on client servicing — a job he calls “slightly ungrateful” because the creative team thinks you do nothing and the client thinks you do everything. The phrase he uses for the skill it taught him is the one that frames the rest of the conversation: “not knowing how to play the violin, but knowing how to run the orchestra.”

That orchestral instinct is what carried over into Fitted. He did not need to know how to stitch. He needed to know how to get a good shirt made, at the price he wanted, with the consistency he wanted.

Five lakh, eleven designs, and the friends who built the first store

Muzamil pushes for the origin story and Muneeb gives it without varnish. The starting capital was five lakh rupees, fifty thousand of which went to a laptop. Some of that money came from his savings during the agency job; the rest came from his father. Eleven designs went into the first drop. The photography was shot by a friend. The website was built by another friend. The company was registered by a third. His father, whom he names repeatedly with gratitude, packed the early COD orders himself.

He calls his first eighteen months “beginner’s luck,” but the more honest description is that the brand survived because he kept overhead at zero. There was no team, no designer, no graphic designer — and so there were no fixed costs to crush him while he learned. He remembers the math he ran on himself in those early months: ten shirts a day and he would be profitable. He was nowhere near ten. He was at three, four, sometimes zero. He stayed with it.

The first inflection came at the end of 2018, about eighteen to nineteen months in, when the team finally widened the catalogue beyond what Muneeb personally wanted to wear and into what the market was asking for. “What was being made was things I wanted to sell, not what the market wanted,” he says of the early line. Once that flipped, the numbers moved. By 2019, Fitted was at two hundred orders a day. Today, the business runs at four to six hundred orders a day online and sells between one thousand and fifteen hundred products per day, retail included. The retail flagship in Gulberg, Lahore opened about a year and a half before the conversation.

Reverse engineering, woven vs knitted, and the fabric Pakistan can actually make

Muzamil shares a personal anecdote that lands cleanly inside Muneeb’s argument about supply. Years earlier, while wearing imported Ralph Lauren shirts that lasted years, he tried to build a small button-shirt business himself. He was told, at the time, that Pakistan’s textile strength was in knitted fabric — hoodies, t-shirts, polos — and not in the woven fabric needed for proper dress shirts. He gave up. He wants to know if that has changed.

Muneeb confirms the timing of the gap and corrects the present. “Till about 2017 that was completely correct,” he says. The knitted side was strong; the woven side, which is what dress shirts and Oxfords are built from, was thin. That has changed. He vouches by name for Shafi Textiles as a local woven source capable of making the kind of fabric the imported brands use. For leather, he names KTM Leather out of Multan, an exporter shipping shoes to Europe and the US whose capacity Fitted draws on directly. Interloop and Style — the country’s giants — have both grown their domestic capacity quickly enough that, in Muneeb’s read, the scarcity story no longer holds for serious local brands.

Fitted’s own internal split is roughly 80-20: about eighty percent of fabric is locally sourced or manufactured, twenty percent imported. The principle he keeps coming back to is that core products — the dress shirts and the polos — stay under tight in-house control on quality and design. Everything else in the catalogue can be sourced, bought, or built however makes sense, as long as the catalogue stays complete. “A fashion retail brand’s most important thing is the catalogue,” he says. “What’s in it, how it looks, what the quality is. The catalogue should be complete.” That is the line he draws, and it maps to how he describes Nike — Nike’s core sneakers and joggers stay under direct control even when manufactured in Vietnam or China, while sweatshirts and hoodies can be outsourced to partners like Interloop.

”Make a good product first. Cost cutting comes later.”

Muzamil presses on the pricing question with a directness worth quoting. He looks at Fitted’s website and sees a dress shirt at twenty-six hundred rupees on sale — eight dollars, the kind of price point that simply does not exist for comparable quality anywhere outside Pakistan. Then he raises the harder version of the question: how do you find the balance between making a product good enough to justify scaling and pricing it for a consumer who is, structurally, still price-conscious and unaware of the imported reference point?

Muneeb’s answer is one of the cleanest passages in the conversation. “There is always a market for the top product. Top talent, top person, top product. So first thing first is to make a good product.” Once the product exists, he says, the real question is not whether there is a market — it is whether you need to create one. He uses Fitted’s women’s polos as the example. Polo shirts were not in trend when Fitted started selling them; the brand’s entire communication strategy was built around creating the trend rather than chasing it. He cites the eastern-western fusion category that several women’s wear brands are now building as a market that did not exist a few years ago and has been manufactured by the brands themselves.

The customer, he argues, often does not know what they want until the catalogue puts it in front of them. He uses Temu as the example anyone can verify in their own behaviour. People do not open Temu intending to buy a specific thing; they open it, browse, and discover needs they did not know they had. That, in Muneeb’s reading, is the work of selling.

The bootstrap as a creative-control strategy

Later in the discussion, Muzamil shifts to the financing question that founders in this category obsess over. Fashion is unusually capital-intensive at scale. The business looks rich on paper because most of the money is locked up in inventory, and growth requires constant cash injection. He wants to know how Muneeb funded the climb without raising.

The answer is patient. Vendors extended credit on the back of eighteen months of goodwill — Muneeb went to them with a clear pitch about what he had learned, what he could sell, and what margin profile he could return at, and asked for terms. They gave them. As repeat customers compounded and prepaid orders grew, the working capital cycle tightened. The retail store was funded out of profits.

He makes a defence of bootstrapping that is harder-edged than the usual founder cliché. “There’s nothing wrong with raising funds, but there’s a benefit of a bootstrapped company that exists as long as it stays bootstrapped. Creative control, brand positioning, offerings, where to sell — a lot of things stay under control. And the founder could be wrong, yes. Most of the time some founders are wrong. They become a bottleneck. But as long as you’re bootstrapped, you stay close to the vision you started with.” Eight years in, he is satisfied with the trade-off. He is open to listening to investment that aligns with the goal. He is not chasing capital. He is, in his own phrasing, chasing loyalty and perception and good numbers.

What word of mouth actually does to the math

On customer acquisition, Muneeb shares a figure most founders would protect more carefully. Fitted’s customer acquisition cost sits at around 500 rupees, sometimes less. The number behind the number, though, is what he wants Muzamil to focus on. “Word of mouth, if we take it as an x — two x, three x — goes to maybe 100x. If a hundred positive customers each tell a hundred people, the chances are too much.”

He places this against a clean analogy. “There is no substitution of word of mouth. You watch a movie because someone recommends it. I can show you the ad as many times as I want. The chances I’ll watch it because of the ad are very thin.” He extends the same logic to a brand experience. The customer service, the delivery, the after-sale — all of it has to land cleanly, because the customer’s willingness to tell other people is the engine.

He also tells a story about the model side of the business, told with the same humility. Some of his earliest shoot models — Ali Raza, Ghusal Khan, Emaad Irfani before the drama that broke him out — were chosen casually, mostly because Fitted was online-heavy and had built a strong Instagram presence. Several of them went on to become genuinely famous. “By chance, I mean we work with some people and they become really famous afterwards,” Muneeb says. It reads less like a marketing strategy than a side effect of a brand that pays attention to who it puts in its frame.

Online is a starting line, not a finish line

Muzamil flags the global expansion question late in the conversation. He sets up the price arbitrage — Fitted’s shirts at eight dollars on sale could be priced at multiples internationally if shipping economics could be solved — and references his conversation with the Laam founder, whose stated vision is to become a Pakistani Shein by collapsing logistics cost. He asks whether Fitted has explored Amazon, marketplace plays, or a logistics rail like Laam’s for international growth.

Muneeb is candid about where Fitted has reached and where it has not. The eastern wear flow out of Pakistan, primarily through Laam, dwarfs everything else combined; western wear has not cracked the international online channel. He gives Sheen credit (“ten, fifteen years ago everyone said Zara couldn’t be beaten, and now Shein is giving them a run for their money”) and refuses to call any incumbent permanent. But on Fitted’s own plan, he is honest. “We’re working on plans but we haven’t been able to crack it as of now.”

The deeper observation he makes is the one founders in the category should sit with. “Find me an example of a fashion online-only brand that has grown like exponentially.” His answer is that the recent break-outs — Amiri, Alo Yoga, Laam in the Pakistani context — all converted to physical retail at the moment they scaled. Online refines the product and builds the initial loyal base. Retail is what unlocks the next order of magnitude. The two are not substitutes; they are sequential.

He gives Muzamil real numbers on the retail unit economics. A modern 1,500 to 2,000 square foot store costs around one crore rupees to build out if the founder runs the project efficiently. Operationally, rent and salaries combined should stay under 15 to 20 percent of revenue. Above 15 percent is a warning sign; below it is healthy.

Returns, prepaid, and the slow build of Pakistani consumer trust

The conversation moves into operational detail that founders in the space rarely get to hear quantified. Fitted’s return rate sits at seven to ten percent. When Muneeb started, it was closer to 25 percent — every fourth order did not deliver. That number has moved because trust has moved.

The prepaid share is doing the same. It has climbed to 15 to 20 percent of orders and is still rising. Muneeb credits the fintech rails for the cultural shift — the awareness that the payment gateway holds card details, not the brand, and that 3D Secure with OTP verification removes the dispute risk that used to plague the category. The gateway commission has crept up alongside, sitting somewhere between 2.5 and 3 percent as of the conversation. Fitted runs on Payfast for prepaid and uses multiple courier partners because, in Muneeb’s framing, none of them does the job well enough alone. Post Ex, he singles out as the strongest of the current crop, while noting that the last-mile rider’s discretion remains the single biggest variable in any Pakistani courier business.

The geographic split is one of the cleanest pieces of data in the episode. Roughly 80 percent of Fitted’s orders come from Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad — KLI — and 20 percent from outside. Muzamil contrasts this with Khaadi, which he says has reportedly pushed its outside-KLI share to 60 percent. The two readings are different but not contradictory. Fitted’s product is positioned where the western wear demand currently sits concentrated. The opportunity outside the cities is real but, in Muneeb’s view, not a fight worth picking when the KLI pie is still expanding faster than the team can chase it.

Repeat customers, expansion, and the missing Pakistani global brand

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil and Muneeb are working through what is genuinely keeping the founder up at night. Fitted’s repeat customer rate sits above 50 percent on most days, which Muneeb calls “very high, Mashallah.” The reverse implication is what concerns him. If repeat customers are that strong, the brand is not pulling new customers in at the rate it should. New customer acquisition is the current bottleneck. Global expansion is the other.

He frames the second concern in unusually national terms. “Pakistan needs it. We need it. But more than this, the country, the nation needs it — that Pakistan has some international representation in brands. There are so many brands, and it’s slightly unfortunate that not a single one has properly gone to global scale yet.” That gap, in his reading, is not a personal ambition. It is a country-level absence that someone is going to fill, and the founders within range of filling it owe themselves the attempt.

Muzamil closes by asking the question he asks every guest — what does Pakistan in 2050 look like, working purely off the current vibe and refusing the “if this, then that” framing. Muneeb gives a four-word answer. “Economic and creative powerhouse.” His reasoning is grounded. Foreign remittance from the Gulf states is funding non-KLI middle-class households at a scale Pakistan has not seen before. A funded middle class becomes an educated middle class. An educated middle class slows the brain drain. The youth bulge, given that scaffolding, becomes a productive demographic rather than a destabilising one. “Twenty-five years out,” he says, “it sounds very promising.”

The conversation lands at one hour forty minutes. Muzamil thanks Muneeb and turns to the audience to ask the question every Pakistani consumer should ask themselves now, while the curve is still building. Have they bought from Fitted. Did they know about it. Is their own consumer behaviour shifting toward branded western wear. And what, watching themselves shift, does that tell them about everyone else.