Thread by @faizansiddiqi

I was today years old when I found out what a 'designer' "lawn" suit costs🧵

15-20k Price points for an outfit + cost of tailoring

Made me question my professional choices & of many other entrepreneurs

Perhaps the best thing to do is to build tech around lawn ..

For niche designers this is how the process works:

1)Call ahead
2)If you are an old customer(no deposit)
3)If you aren't well heeled then you may need to do a bank transfer to hold(with more niche designers albeit)
4)On the designated day show up
5)Avg cart size is 5 outfits

The name “lawn cloth” comes from the French city of Laon, which was where this textile was first woven. (says the internet)

At first, lawn cloth was primarily made with linen, which was more abundant in Europe at the time. material.

As cotton imports from India became more commonplace, however, weavers of lawn cloth gradually made the shift to this alternative textile. At the same time that Indian cotton was making its way into France, French lawn cloth was also making its way into India.

Indian weavers started making this lightweight cloth into traditional shalwar kameez , which are also known as “lawn suits” due to their incorporation of the European lawn cloth weave. Post partition the majority of lawn suit production started taking place in 🇵🇰

Imagine this is where our free cash flow is going, besides real estate and diamonds and other non productive asset classes, "lawn" has to be the worst performing asset class in the country.

Would love to learn total domestic lawn sales through put. Has to be a couple of 100m$

What is more interesting is Indian websites listing real time Pakistani Lawn. The Arbitrage is interesting
thefashionstation.in/product/zaria-…
INR Selling Price =6194

ethnic.pk/collections/za…
PKR Price=8990
Effective INR Price= 2645
INR Margin = 3550
So $ 12.77 Per Sale to the IN seller

Cant imagine how the logistics for this work, PK-DUBAI-India. Some one some where is making a killing at scale. Because most/if not all the sites are the same site/different URLs. Solidly SEOd , targeting Indians in India and overseas. Imagine the demand + great search capability

Sadly if you went to @SanaSafinaz own website. You can see their current lawn collection but u cant search the world Lawn.The mass producers of the product basically suck at digital & give market share to others who are re-shipping their products globally due to better discovery

Truthfully this is outside of my wheelhouse, as in designers & listings.

But given the demand, I saw the Indian sites catalogue all/most Pakistani designers + their current stuff in a single market place.

Yet to see that done even locally. Imagine affiliate potential.

Similarly for @Khaadi . They have Lawn suits/listed & being sold yet, search disappoints

How in the world are these stellar brands so f**ing backwards in their tech?

As the CEO, I'd focus on hiring right. The IFC Due diligence & promised "advisory support" missed the tech piece

What doesn't disappoint is Alkaram Studio, hat tip @kkoraishy your "lawn" search actually works. For all others you should really borrow from his play book and fix your digital offerings.

Also @Sapphirewear has a fully functional search. Kudos to you.

I just picked the brands I know about, hear about. Not an exhaustive drill down. But for folks whose bread and butter is sales around product discovery, missing rudimentary items such as search is not the only thing, the amount of quick wins possible across their sites is crazy.

This rabbit hole was brought to you by me being awed at (price points), within a niche(aka designer lawn) but it led me to discovery, search, pricing, export potential, re marketing, affiliate & distribution within big-brand-lawn.

Moral of the story:

You can merchandize all you want, but if you do not understand search, tech, discovery, or don't pay attention to modernize those things, you are missing out.(Incremental Sales if nothing else)

Also, It's OK to get help.

DMs open for all 🇵🇰 brands