Fashioning A New Future For Pakistan

Elmira Bayrasli, 11.23.10, 04:35 PM EST

How Seema Aziz built Pakistan's leading fashion house, Bareeze, on a dare, and became a champion of educating nearly 150,000 rural children.

For the past 25years, millions around the world have been buying elegant clothes and fabrics made by the Pakistan-based textile maker Bareeze. Not many realize that their money helps educate Pakistan's exploding and underserved youth.

One of Pakistan's leading high-end fashion retailers, Barezee plays a key role in supporting CARE Pakistan (Cooperation for Advancement, Rehabilitation and Education--not related to its U.S.-based namesake), which has set up more than 200 schools in rural areas of northern Pakistan.

Bareeze's cofounder, Seema Aziz (left), says she started her thriving business neither to make money nor to help children, but as a result of a challenge. No Pakistani had succeeded in producing high-quality textiles for the domestic market, much less for export. Living in Lahore, Pakistan's cultural capital, Aziz and her brother, who together launched the company in 1985, wanted to prove that their country could produce fabrics as chic as any in Europe.

"You're never going to manage unless you sell it with a 'Made in France' stamp on it," one shopkeeper at Lahore's foreign goods market told her when she brought in her samples.

That was all she needed to hear. Without any formal design training, and with no equipment other than her father's two Swiss-made embroidery machines, she and her brother set out to prove that shopkeeper wrong.

The fabrics Bareeze began producing were of such high quality--completely different from the low-grade, mass-produced ones other Pakistani companies made--that some buyers even doubted they were really local. "We built a reputation as a shop that sells imported fabric and calls it Pakistani," she told me with a warm smile when I visited her in her high-ceilinged, Spartan office last month.

By the mid 1990s Barezee had emerged as one of Pakistan's most widely admired retailers, with shops in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Delhi, London, Manchester and Malaysia. A privately held company, it has also built a reputation as one of the country's few multi-million dollar business chains with 40% of its shops in franchise hands. With 5,000 employees, nearly 90 shops worldwide, Bareeze is one of Pakistan's leading businesses.

In 1988, after floods devastated areas around Lahore, Aziz took another giant step by launching CARE.

"Three of us went out to help with food and water," she recalled. "Hundreds of dirty, half-naked children with runny noses and matted hair ran after me ev"Why do these children follow me around?" she asked one of the villagers.

"What should they do?" came the reply. It was then that Aziz realized the village had no school.

"Hold high the torch," Aziz told me, reciting what she knew of an anonymous poem. 'Twas given you by other hands, you know. 'Tis yours to keep it burning bright."

"Until I visited that village, I thought life was great," she said. What she realized was that while her life was great, it was protected--not by money, but education.

"The biggest difference between me and those villagers was that I was educated and they were not," she said. Determined to give others some of the advantages she had enjoyed, she founded CARE Pakistan.

Aziz wanted the foundation to be a vehicle to create "equality of opportunity," not dependence. Though all children were given uniforms and school supplies, they were charged a marginal fee of 10 rupees, or 11 U.S. cents. "I did not want any child to grow up thinking that he or she was educated on charity," Aziz told a Pakistani reporter as the project was beginning. "We firmly believe that it is their right and our duty."

She also believes it is her duty to oversee the quality of teaching and materials being used in "her" classrooms. "I won't allow anyone to teach in my class unless I have seen the lecture first," she said.

CARE's first school opened in 1991 with 250 students, paid for with Aziz's personal funds as well as help from friends and family. The following year 450 enrolled. Demand grew. Over the next two years, Aziz raised money by appealing to friends and anyone she came across, and managed to open 10 more schools. Then she raised funds for 20 more. In the late 1990s she began to channel a small percentage (.75%) of Bareeze's sales to CARE. Today the company puts in 1.3% of sales.

Stability and reliability, Aziz says account for the 100% literacy rates her CARE Pakistan schools have yielded. Her success was so remarkable that in 1998, Lahore's city government asked her to take over its school system. Despite the ensuing bureaucracy and resistance from teachers' unions, she initially took over 10 schools, and eventually more.

Today Seema Aziz's CARE Pakistan supports more students than any other non-governmental organization in Pakistan--a total of 146,000. And she's not satisfied.

"In the context of this country it is not large enough," she said. Pakistan's population is estimated to be 180 million, 60% of which is under the age of 25. Only slightly over half of that population is literate. Aziz is ready to do more but needs more human and financial resources.

"The children are ours, the country is ours," she told me, a sense of urgency rising in her voice. "It is the duty of a society, not a single person or entity, to look after its people."

The devastating floods that hit Pakistan this past summer, along with a growing insurgency inside the country and the war in neighboring Afghanistan, have left more children in need.

To meet the growing demand, Aziz has staffed CARE with professional management. That has helped expand operations. It has also allowed her to focus on operating Bareeze, where she innovates new designs and fashion lines. Children's wear and home furnishings are two of the latest. Both are producing record profits for the company, which in turn helps educate Pakistan's children.

"I'm doing what anyone in my position would," she smiled, the sunlight beaming in from the window behind her. "I feel very lucky."

Sitting across from this forceful visionary, who was dressed in flowing sea green shalwar kameez, I tried to understand how she runs a world-class business as well as a globally recognized nonprofit in such a modest and deliberate manner--and as a woman in Pakistan.

"I don't look at anything as a hindrance," she said, speaking so quickly that she barely finished her sentences. "Every obstacle is something to surpass."

You can also view this story at the link below on Forbes.com

http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/23/seema-aziz-barezee-care-pakistan-forbes-woman-entrepreneurs-education_3.html