NIC Faisalabad recently hosted another edition of its Gather and Grow community event, this time centering the conversation on one of the more compelling entrepreneurial stories to emerge from Pakistan’s e-commerce sector in recent years. Umar Qamar, founder of elo, took the floor to walk an audience of founders, innovators, and industry practitioners through the journey of building a digital-first fashion brand that has grown into one of the fastest-moving e-commerce names in the country. The session, held under the broader support of Ignite, the National Technology Fund operating under the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, continued Gather and Grow’s consistent tradition of bringing practitioners with real operational experience into direct conversation with the next generation of Pakistani entrepreneurs.
What made Qamar’s story particularly resonant for the room was where it began. Elo did not start with venture capital, a polished brand identity, or a carefully designed go-to-market strategy. It started with export leftovers, surplus fabric and finished goods that would otherwise have gone to waste, and a founder willing to test whether Pakistani consumers online would respond to quality fashion at accessible price points. That willingness to start with what was available, rather than waiting for ideal conditions, is a lesson that carries significant weight in a market where many aspiring founders remain stuck at the starting line waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect product before taking their first step.
Qamar spoke at length about the mechanics of building a brand powered by online consumer behavior, an area that remains poorly understood by many traditional businesses attempting to make the transition to digital sales and one that is still being figured out in real time even by those who started there. He covered the architecture of elo’s growth, from how the brand identified and responded to patterns in what Pakistani consumers were searching for, buying, and returning, to how the team used that data to make decisions about inventory, product design, and customer experience. For founders in the room who are at earlier stages of building their own digital businesses, this level of operational transparency from someone who has already navigated the same terrain offered something far more actionable than general advice about the promise of e-commerce.
The session also touched on the harder realities of scaling a digital-first business in Pakistan, where infrastructure gaps, logistics challenges, consumer trust issues around online payments, and the volatility of digital advertising costs create a gauntlet that filters out founders who are not genuinely committed to solving problems as they arise rather than as they are anticipated. Qamar did not shy away from these difficulties, and the candor with which he addressed them appeared to resonate with an audience that has likely encountered similar friction in their own ventures. The framing throughout was less about celebrating what elo had achieved and more about being honest about what it had cost and what it had required.
NIC Faisalabad’s Gather and Grow series has been building a steady rhythm of exactly this kind of event, ones that prioritize depth of conversation over breadth of attendance and that measure success by the quality of insight participants leave with rather than the size of the crowd they draw. By bringing in founders like Umar Qamar who are close enough to the early-stage struggle to remember it clearly but far enough along to speak about it with perspective, the series is quietly becoming one of the more valuable recurring touchpoints for Faisalabad’s growing startup community, a city that has long had the industrial base and the entrepreneurial appetite to produce significant companies but has not always had the ecosystem infrastructure to support them.
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