Educating Pakistan

Pakistan society intended Seema Aziz to be a wife and mother. Her father arranged for her to get married at a young age, and by her early thirties she had a comfortable life as a Lahore housewife, married to a chemical engineer.

Then she took charge of her own fate. In the late 1970s, well before the era of jihad, Pakistan was flooded with western products. People began wearing jeans and T-shirts, leading Seema to conclude that there was a market for high-quality Pakistani clothes produced locally. She opened her first shop in 1985, when she was 34, in Lahore’s ancient cloth market. Her family told her they were ashamed because she had gone into business, but her instincts were vindicated: the clothes flew off the shelves. ‘Later I came to understand what entrepreneur means: you create a product that people don’t know they need with money that does not exist.’