How to make retailing customer friendly? Hear from entrepreneurs Alyzeh Shirazi and Anush Ammar

Entrepreneurs Alyzeh Rahim Shirazi and Anush Ammar aim to make fashion retailing customer-friendly

LAHORE: The past few years have seen a number of young entrepreneurs step into the local fashion industry. These young go-getters are pushing the envelope through innovative business models and by remodeling existing concepts, such the brick and mortar store concept. Fabbitt (an e-commerce website) and The Exhibit Concept Store in Lahore are two such start ups to have appeared on the fashion map recently. The Express Tribune speaks to the brains behind the ventures on how they chose their business models and where they are headed.

The Exhibit Concept store was launched at Lahore’s Gulberg Galleria in June. The idea behind the store centers on a curation of fashion and lifestyle brands along with an in-house blow dry bar. This association comes as a first for Pakistan, where fashion brands have previously merged only with restaurants, and that too, only on Karachi’s fashion savvy E Street. The Xanders/Ensemble and Mews/Feeha Jamshed collaboration has proved to be a successful marriage between food and fashion.

With The Exhibit store, Shirazi and her business partner Sania Hasnain have merged everything under one roof, a one-stop-shop where they want people to be able to shop and/or prepare for a night out. For her business model, Shirazi felt, e-commerce was not the best way to start, “The idea is to stand out. We will strategise a way to come online in a manner that is in sync with our brand’s DNA. The reason we decided to open a shop is because a concept store like this doesn’t exist in the market”. The Exhibit started out with multi-brand exhibitions in Lahore and Islamabad that finally culminated into a store. “Currently we are focusing on the concept store for summer and have hired designers on a 6-month basis,” added Shirazi.



Among other lifestyle and fashion brands, The Exhibit houses Shirazis brands, Magicosmetix and Arsazi, which already have an existing presence online. “These two brands are marketed internationally. People abroad are already onboard with the idea of purchasing online and do it with great ease. Locally, it is something that the people are just getting used to but from what I can see, it will catch on big time.”

Anush Ammar, who recently launched the online platform Fabbitt was all in favour of e-commerce. “This was the perfect time to launch an e-commerce fashion portal. Fashion has clearly flourished but so have cell phone providers in recent years,” she explained. “As phones become cheaper, they naturally become more accessible to people. So you have a product and you have the perfect exhibiting tool, but there’s no real marriage between the two so we took the fashion website route.” Prior to launching the website,  Ammar partook in extensive market research. “We came to the conclusion that the Pakistani consumer is hesitant in completely trusting the online world. However, the world has become increasingly fast-paced. Therefore shopping must be made convenient and shouldn’t be a burden on people.”



As an entrepreneur, she believes a fashion e-commerce platform with an integrated social plan can make all the difference. The website also features a regularly updated blog with styling tips. “It really helps people understand fashion where it’s not intimidating to them. It offers them a relaxing experience right from the comfort of their home,” she said. Ammar has not considered making a brick and mortar store because at the moment, she is more focused on making the shop-from-home experience worthwhile. “Two issues that we have encountered in establishing our website is that people think what’s being offered is almost ‘too good to be true’ and secondly, they are unwilling to trust the online platform with large amounts of money,” revealed the entrepreneur. However, she remains optimistic that both problems can be steamrolled with time.

By amalgamating creativity with substantial business know-how, fashion entrepreneurs are converting their visions into profitable realities, online or in physical form. Only time will tell which business model proves to be more successful for the diverse Pakistani market.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2016.

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