OUR MISSION
Pakistan already makes the leather the world wears. Almost none of it is sold here.
The leather is good and the people who cut and stitch it are as good as any in the trade. The work leaves the country and comes back with somebody else's name in the collar.
My family has worked in leather for three generations. The pieces are made in Karachi, in a workshop we own, from hides tanned in Karachi, Sukkur and Lahore. What comes off those tables sits in shops across Europe.
I grew up in the UK. I have seen what sells there, at what price and with whose name on it, and I have seen the room it was made in.
What has never sat right is how little of it stays. Pakistan has the hides, the machinery and the hands, and the people here have been quietly making other people's collections for decades.
What this workshop is known for is the technically difficult work, the garments and bags a lot of factories turn down.
There are still very few places in this country where you can buy something made to that standard and be looked after properly while you do it.
The talent was never the problem. The label was.
WHERE IT IS MADE
Karachi. Our own workshop and our own people, from hides tanned in Karachi, Sukkur and Lahore.
WHERE IT HAS BEEN SOLD
Shops across Europe, for three decades, under names that were never ours.
So PANCH is made where the work already was. Full grain hides and goat suede, cut, stitched and finished by people we employ. Most of it is done by hand, because most of what we make cannot be done any other way.
Modern pieces, not a heritage re-issue. Made to be worn now, and still worth wearing in ten years. That is the whole standard.
We work in small numbers. That is the advantage, not the limitation. A factory built for ten thousand units cannot stop to try something. We can.
Short runs, special editions, pieces made once and never repeated, bespoke work cut to one person. If an idea is only worth making once, we still make it.
The other half of it is the club.
We socialise here. It is how people meet and how most good ideas in this city start. A brand built in Pakistan that ignores that has misread the place.
Buying a piece makes you a member, and the club is where members meet each other. Dinners, evenings, rooms worth being in. That is the plan, and none of it has happened yet.
That is not decoration. The people wearing this are part of it. What they tell us changes what we make next, and the brand belongs to them as much as it does to me.
It starts in Karachi because that is where the work is. It will not stay there.
MehdiFOUNDER OF PANCH
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