In 2007 Mehrbano Sethi started a cosmetics company in a country that had no meaningful eCommerce, no digital payment infrastructure, and no domestic beauty industry to speak of. Her first website took close to five minutes to load. She packed parcels herself and drove them to the post office. The real Pakistani eCommerce boom did not arrive until around 2016 or 2017 — nearly a decade after she started.
I have sat across from a lot of founders. The ones who last tend to share one trait, and Mehrbano states it more clearly than most: she was not trying to sell a product, she was trying to build a brand. Her framing is that Amazon sells products and Coca-Cola sells a brand, and she wanted the second thing. That is a slower, harder path, and it is the reason the business is still here nineteen years later.
The short version
Pick one niche and prove it can sustain itself before adding a second. In a market with no accessible credit lines and no real angel network, sustainability is the only safety net you have. Scaling into three products before the first is stable is how most Pakistani brands quietly die.
The gap that made the brand
The trigger was a comparison she could not stop making. Friends studying abroad had access to credible international beauty brands. Pakistan had almost nothing equivalent — what circulated locally was substantially rejected international stock, product that had failed testing elsewhere and been dumped into a market with no enforcement.
That is a wedge, and it is worth naming the general principle: the strongest brand positions in Pakistan are usually built where the existing supply is either absent or untrustworthy. Not where it is merely expensive.
Category economics: why return rates decide your model
One of the most useful things in this case is hard numbers on returns across categories, which founders here rarely get to see side by side.
| Category | Typical return rate | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Shoes, US marketplaces | Up to 62% | Sizing uncertainty with no physical try-on |
| Shoes, Pakistan | 40–45% | Same sizing problem, established brands |
| General eCommerce average | 15–18% | Across clothing, footwear, organics |
| Luscious (cosmetics) | ~9%, sometimes lower | Genuine category advantage |
This is not a marketing statistic. It is the difference between a viable unit economic and an unviable one. If you are choosing a category to enter, the return rate is as important as the margin — because in a cash-on-delivery market, a returned parcel costs you the outbound leg, the return leg, and the tied-up cash, and earns you nothing.
Safety before certification
This is the section I would make every founder in beauty and skincare read. Mehrbano has advised foreign governments on cosmetic safety standards, and she is direct about the misconceptions circulating in Pakistan's local skincare scene:
- The animal-fat claim is mostly marketing. Animal-derived ingredients in cosmetics are rare to begin with — most waxes and oils used are not animal-derived — so advertising their absence is rarely meaningful differentiation.
- Halal is not the same as safe. The standards correlate, because both restrict certain inputs. But halal certification does not test for heavy metal contamination in pigments and dyes. That requires separate, dedicated testing.
- Real clinical testing is rare here. Proper three-month consumer testing — the kind that lets a product be legally sold in markets like Dubai — is largely absent from the Korean-inspired skincare brands operating locally.
Her sequencing is safety first, halal claims second. And she connects it straight back to the business: unsafe product causes reactions, reactions destroy the returning-customer relationship, and repeat purchase is the metric that actually determines whether a beauty brand survives.
On fake discounts
Luscious deliberately avoids permanent strikethrough pricing. Her position is that it is not illegal in Pakistan, since nobody enforces it, but that it is dishonest — and she cites research suggesting the overwhelming majority of Pakistani sites using strikethrough pricing are showing an "original" price that was never a real sustained selling price.
I would add the commercial argument to the ethical one. If your baseline price is fiction, you have permanently trained your customers to wait for the sale, and you have given up the ability to run a real promotion that actually moves demand. There are legitimate reasons to discount — clearing slow inventory, smoothing genuinely soft months, driving trial of a new product — and all of them work better when your regular price means something.
What AI does and does not replace
Both Mehrbano and her ecommerce director are unusually candid here. He ran a campaign that was underperforming, asked an AI tool for a new plan, and implemented its suggestions faithfully for about six weeks — cycling through revisions each time results stalled — only for the tool to eventually recommend going back to what the team had been doing two months earlier, which had been working.
The lesson is not that AI is useless. It is that AI has no visibility into context it was never given. It did not know their return rate. It did not know their cash cycle. It optimised for a generic environment rather than their real one. AI is a suggestion engine, not a decision-maker, and the decision still has to come from operating judgement.
Fresh Labs: the discipline of a narrow audience
Her new venture is deliberately narrow — a skincare-first brand aimed at roughly 18 to 32 year olds, with a stated willingness to not talk to anyone outside that band. Around 52% of purchases come from men, largely through a branded WhatsApp assistant that lets male customers ask questions privately rather than approach a saleswoman in store.
That last detail is worth pausing on. It is a product decision that solves a cultural friction, and it opened a demographic most Pakistani beauty brands do not serve at all. That is what a real customer insight looks like — not a persona document, a specific awkwardness removed.
Two days after launch, Fresh Labs was already seeing repeat customers and strong review sentiment. The binding constraint was not product quality. It was acquisition cost. Which is exactly why the audience is drawn so tightly.
Seven things worth taking from this
- Build for brand recall from day one, not first-sale efficiency.
- Prove one product sustains itself before you add a second.
- Choose your category with the return rate in front of you.
- Test for safety before you advertise certifications.
- Keep your regular price honest so your promotions still work.
- Use AI for suggestions and keep the decisions.
- The unboxing moment — packaging, scent, first impression — is a retention lever, not a cosmetic one.
If you are building in beauty or personal care and want help getting the unit economics and retention structure right before you scale spend, that is the work I do with brands as an eCommerce consultant.
