Online to In-store: A Business Success Story Ft. Soha Yaseen

Today I sit down with Soha Yaseen, the founder of Sowears, the modest Western clothing brand that started on Instagram and now has its own physical store in Karachi. And I have to say, this conversation is one of those that reminds me why I started this podcast in the first place. It is raw, it is honest, and it gets into the parts of building a business that we do not always see on a perfectly curated feed.

Soha talks about starting with just 40,000 rupees and a desire to pay for her own university projects. She talks about the years she did not even know if she was in profit or loss. She talks about walking to cafes in 50-degree heat to work on growth strategy because staying home meant distractions. This is not a story about overnight success. It is about the small, unglamorous decisions that slowly turn a side hustle into something real.

It started as a means to an end

Soha was studying textile design at AIFD, a field she chose almost by accident because, as she puts it, “there was no counseling.” The projects were expensive, and she did not want to keep asking her parents for money. So she looked at what was missing: modest Western clothes that felt right for a Pakistani woman. Not too Western, not too traditional. The kind of thing she herself would get tailored. So she started making them, posting on Instagram and Facebook, and selling. She had no big business dream. “I had no intention of making Sowears this big,” she tells me. “I just started from my bed.”

But here is the thing. Even without a dream, passion crept in. She remembers seeing other fashion students carrying fabric bags from big brands and thinking, “I need I want to see Sowears on that bag one day.” That quiet thought, that small want, became the fuel.

Letting go is the hardest and most necessary part

For the first few years, Soha was doing everything. Designing, packing orders, managing Instagram. Her first employee was a college friend she hired to handle social media. Even that felt huge. But the real shift came when she got married and moved abroad for a time. She realized she had to step out of the daily operations. “I started focusing on growth rather than being in operations,” she says. She would take her laptop and sit in a cafe from nine in the morning till nine at night, just working on how to scale. No distractions. No household chores.

I hear this so often from business owners: the fear of letting go of control. Soha is honest about how hard it is, but also how necessary. “If you’re so consumed by the day to day and the operations you can never focus on the macro,” she says. And that is exactly it. Your business does not grow if you are still packing every single order yourself.

Customer service is everything, even when it breaks you

One of the biggest points Soha kept coming back to was customer service. She calls it the most gratifying and the most challenging part. There were nights she could not sleep because a customer was unhappy, because someone was shouting at her. But she still insists that making a customer happy is the best marketing you can do. Word of mouth, she believes, is everything.

She talks about how even now, if a customer has a complaint, she will step in and talk to them herself. That personal touch matters. “Once customers start trusting you,” she says, “they just bring you word of mouth.” And trust, in a market where people are still skeptical about buying clothes online, is the whole game.

Marketing is a mix, not a magic trick

Soha admits she ignored marketing for the first two or three years. She just ran ads haphazardly. Now she knows ads are critical because they target people who are ready to buy, but influencer marketing builds the trust and the recall. “If I am seeing someone wear it and it looks good, I’m more likely to remember the brand when a friend asks,” she explains. Ads and influencers work together. You cannot just pick one and ignore the other.

She also gives a small, practical piece of advice: YouTube. You can learn to run ads yourself. She did it when she had no money for agencies. Now there are agencies that charge on revenue, not monthly fees, so even small businesses can access good marketing. But the principle stays the same: start small, learn, and keep at it.

Opening a store when everyone said no

This is the part of the story that I find so inspiring. An online brand opening a physical store is rare in Pakistan. Soha decided to do it because she realized a huge chunk of customers will never buy clothes they cannot try on first. “My own friends do not buy online,” she says. So she wanted to reach those people.

But getting into a mall was brutal. Mall managements want established, famous brands. They did not want to take a risk on a young woman with a small e-commerce brand. She pitched and pitched, and most doors closed. Then, at Square One Mall, the owners said yes. They believed in her. She still gets emotional remembering it: “They actually told me, we trust you and we think you should be here.”

She opened the store in just two months, hiring a store manager before the launch so he could help figure out the POS systems, the card machines, the whole new world of physical retail. It was a massive financial risk, but for Soha, it was worth it to give her brand that layer of legitimacy.

The quiet weight of being a young woman in business

We do not talk about this enough, but Soha names it: the pressure of being a girl, of being young, of being doubted before you even open your mouth. She says there was a time she would say no to interviews because she could not talk to people. Now she is pitching to mall owners, handling unhappy customers, leading a team of over 80 people. The business forced her to grow in ways she never expected.

And then there is the weight of being someone people rely on for a paycheck. She admits that when dark thoughts come, the thought that keeps her going is that she does not want anyone to lose their job. That sense of responsibility? That is a quiet, heavy thing. But it can also be a powerful motivator.

The small things that matter

At the end of the conversation, Soha says something that stays with me. She talks about the young women who message her on Instagram, asking how she did it. They take the time to write, they are passionate, and it makes her want to reply even when she is exhausted. She tells them: do what no one is doing, or what very few are doing. Do not just copy a business that is already working. Find your own expertise, your own passion. And then be patient.

That is the note I want to leave on. Because this whole episode is a collection of small, honest moments. The girl who just wanted to pay for her art supplies. The nights she did not sleep. The cafe table that became an office. The mall owner who said yes. None of it is flashy. All of it matters.