At the turn of the century, Shahzad Qureshi and Mehdi Hasnain started a small e-commerce store selling Pakistani handicrafts in the US. They spun off a gifting service for the Pakistani diaspora who wanted to send gifts back home. Little did they realize that they would be setting the pace of e-commerce adoption in their home country.
Azhar Rizvi:
This is the story of two friends who developed an e-commerce portal in the pre-Google era. Our collaboration resulted in their training in logistics, marketing and attracting investment. My association with them continued even after BAP was over and we worked together on areas like partnerships and branding.
Tohfay.com is a great example of servicing a market. It is a business model that has matured into a great platform and continues to evolve. The team’s other company is mamooinpakistan.com, a concierge service which handles sensitive paperwork for its clients. Their efforts show that Pakistan offers tremendous opportunities to explore and build dream ventures.
Tohfay
While enrolled in a textile engineering course, Shahzad Qureshi had never imagined that one day he would be changing the face of e-commerce in Pakistan with an online gifting service.
Tohfay.com was born when Shahzad, Mehdi Hasnain and their partners decided to source handicrafts from Pakistan to the US, Canada and the UK. In an unexpected turn of events, the venture failed, but a small branch of the business, which allowed overseas Pakistanis to send gifts back home, started generating a healthy revenue and grew rapidly to become a well-known name in the market. What started as a small investment of US$10,000 between the partners has swelled into a pool of over half-a-million dollars. The entrepreneurial startup now employs 35 people, with many others on contract.
Today the partners consider Tohfay.com as their gift to the Pakistani diaspora connecting them to family and friends back home.
Read about How Tohfay pivoted to become the top gifting site on Entrepreneuring Pakistan .
