Behind the scenes of building DenimNotes — onboarding Pakistan's leading denim mills, preparing for Kingpins Amsterdam, and rethinking how the textile supply chain shares information.
There are mills, and then there is Artistic Milliners. Founded in Karachi in 1949, they now produce 108 million meters of fabric and 30 million garments annually — and they're testing DenimNotes at Kingpins. Here's what we learned.
Naveena Denim Mills produces 18 million meters a year and exports to Levi's and Zara. We brought them onto DenimNotes in Week 2, Visit 3 — a virtual meeting spanning 1,192 km from Lahore to Karachi.
A full in-person showroom visit to Diamond Denim by Sapphire — 20+ garments on the floor, a live platform demo on the big screen, and five people who've seen the future of trade show intelligence up close.
Week 1 of building DenimNotes in public. Nishat Mills have been in textiles since 1951, supply JACK & JONES, export to 40+ countries, and just put Rs.12 billion into a new denim plant. We went to their Lahore office and showed them what we were building.
A complete guide to our supplier onboarding journey — from Naveena Denim Mills to Artistic Milliners — and how DenimNotes is becoming the trade show CRM for Pakistan's denim industry.
Indigo Textile's team in Karachi had already been looking for exactly what we're building — a shared platform for mill-buyer communication. 1,180km, three people on the call, and a conversation that confirmed we're solving the right problem.
Ahsan Zia Khanzada at Siddiqsons Group replied to our LinkedIn message before we'd even explained the product — and what he wrote nailed the exact problem DenimNotes solves. One of the cleanest product-market fit moments of Week 4.
Azgard 9 — one of Pakistan's denim pioneers, working with leading European brands — brought five people from PD and Fabric Sales to the call. We went deep on information scatter, how the sales cycle fragments, and what it would mean to fix it. They loved it. Then asked to help make it better.
AGI Denim — Pakistan's fastest growing denim company — had the whole team in their Karachi boardroom. 1,200 km away, I showed them DenimNotes live. The questions they asked made clear: this team thinks differently.
Meeting 20. The last demo of the first leg. Neela by Sapphire Fibres is where I first developed my love for denim — and first understood the information asymmetry between departments that DenimNotes was built to solve.
Nicolas Prophte — 25 years at Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Pepe Jeans & LVMH, and Founder of the Denim Deal Foundation — on DenimNotes. His words: "Umer does exactly that — turning years of industry experience into a tool to simplify the backend of our industry."