PUNJAB, Pakistan — Saba Gul, founder of the fashionable handbag company Popinjay, has created a new life for herself and many other Pakistani women like her.
Popinjay is a newly established handbag company located in Punjab, Pakistan, making beautiful, high-quality purses. The handbags have intricate designs that are reminiscent of Islamic architecture and Turkish textiles. The fine quality of the leather, silk and other materials used makes this a high-end brand.
However, what makes this business unique is that, behind closed doors, this profitable company is giving jobs to young women with limited opportunities. Gul hires Pakistani women to create these fashionable accessories by hand, particularly those who were forced to leave school, illiterate and/or are in poverty.
Gul’s personal experience and her observation of Pakistani girls around her sparked her idea to help those at a disadvantage because of their gender: “We have a special focus on women, since I was born and raised in Pakistan, and women are the most neglected segment of population there. Popinjay aspires to create a more just, more beautiful world through the production and sale of its products.”
Although Gul’s intelligence enabled her to graduate with an engineering degree from MIT, she continued to stay concerned about the limitations that restrict women’s opportunities. After graduating, she landed an engineering job where she made six figures. It did not take her long to realize her time could be better spent tapping into her creative talents and helping women in poverty.
Prior to her brand Popinjay, Gul had tried creating a completely non-profit organization called BLISS in March 2011. While the creation of handbags was still part of the blueprint for BLISS, the focus was to provide jobs for women living on less than $2 per day.
Gul gave up everything and used part of personal savings to risk initiating BLISS, which gratifyingly gave jobs to 40 uneducated Punjabi women.
While Gul felt fulfilled with her non-profit work, she was weeks from running out of money by the fourth quarter of 2012, with a declination in sales and no means to launch a new collection. She notes that she had underestimated the difficulties of raising money for her non-profit, and in January of 2013, Gul rebranded BLISS into the now-successful company, Popinjay.
Gul started studying fashion trends after BLISS failed in order to create a profitable company. She started reaching out to high-end suppliers and completely altered her mindset to generate something sustainable. She learned how to construct detailed reports and produce financial projections in Excel spreadsheets to draw in sponsors. Gul negotiated with investors and raised $265,000 off the bat.
She took her non-profit plan and turned it into a business proposal that still carried her altruistic goal but yielded revenue. Popinjay launched its first line of handbags in October 2013, and after a short seven weeks of sales, the income was equal to an entire year with BLISS.
While Gul is proud of her efforts as an entrepreneur, she finds more contentment in hiring women who motivated this dream. While BLISS employed 40 women, Popinjay already employs 150, and with revenue rapidly increasing Gul will have to hire more women to keep up.
“We work in a small village in northern Punjab where women are mostly unemployed. These are women that were unable to get an education when younger due to a lack of financial resources, and lack any marketable skills that would allow them to earn a living for themselves. Popinjay helps these women break the cycle of poverty by training them in an indigenous skill and giving them fair-wage employment.” Gul said in an interview with Conscious Magazine.
Gul also described the nobility of the women working for her and that, “The money they earn from being part of our program is spent on education for their children, healthcare for their families, and basic household and food needs. These women are now able to educate their own children and dream of a better future for them than they had dared image for themselves at that age.”
The success and status of Popinjay is flourishing, as boutiques are starting to pick up the handbags and the popular store Anthropologie has made a deal to start selling the bags online this spring.
She has added in describing her company’s accomplishments, “I have chosen to create a conscious brand because I was blown away by the wealth of talent present in artisan communities in places like Pakistan, and wanted to find a dignified, ethical way to allow this talent to reach global markets.” It will not be long before Popinjay is on the shelves of stores around the world, hopefully still carrying the same benevolent objective with which Gul started.
– Danielle Warren
Sources: CNN, Conscious Magazine, Popinjay
Photo: CNN