How Swag Kicks turned Karachi's landa bazaar into an online sneaker brand
Swag Kicks sells preloved Nikes and Jordans to Pakistanis who cannot pay retail. After the 2023 currency crisis nearly closed the Karachi company, it started selling the warehouse software it had built for itself.
A pair of Air Jordans or Nikes that Nofal Khan wanted as a schoolboy in Karachi cost Rs60,000 to Rs70,000 new, he told Dawn's Aurora magazine in January 2025. He could not pay that. A childhood friend, whose father was in the preloved trade, took him to the family warehouse, and Khan hunted through the containers for pairs he liked. He wore his finds to school. "Suddenly we were the coolest kids in school," he said.
That friend became a cofounder of Swag Kicks, a Karachi company that sells preloved sneakers, streetwear, bags and accessories online. It was founded in 2019, and it takes the used clothing trade that Pakistanis know as landa, long sold from street stalls and bazaars, and puts it behind a graded online catalogue.
A large market, sold unevenly
The supply is not in doubt. Gulf News reported that Pakistan's used clothing imports rose 83 percent in the 2020 to 2021 financial year, to 732,623 tonnes worth $309 million. Arab News, citing official data, put imports in the following year at 978,699 tonnes worth more than $433 million.
Khan told Business Recorder that goods in the thrift markets are mostly C category, while Swag Kicks sells higher grade stock. Its suppliers buy containers of used clothing from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe. The company grades each item for condition: a 10 out of 10 is close to new, an 8 shows signs of wear. By early 2023 it listed more than 60 sneaker brands and about 25,000 items, and said it had served more than 100,000 customers.
The team and the first money
Khan is the chief executive. Gulf News says he had launched startups before and ran a digital agency. Cofounder Mateen Ansari previously worked at Daraz, The Luxury Closet and Careem, according to Business Recorder. The third cofounder, Hamza Abid, has experience trading preloved fashion in global markets.
Covid 19 hit the company hard, Arab News reported, but it recovered and raised $200,000 in pre seed funding in early 2021. The larger round followed in February 2023: a $1.2 million seed led by i2i Ventures, the Pakistani venture fund run by Kalsoom Lakhani and Misbah Naqvi. Techstars Toronto, CrossFund of Hong Kong, Rose Lake Ventures, i5 Capital, STAK Group and angel investors also took part.
Swag Kicks said it was the first second hand clothing business in Pakistan to attract foreign investment. Naqvi said the secondhand market in Pakistan is large but its supply side is fragmented, and that the team's back end systems let it operate at scale. Lakhani said that while international startup funding was still declining in 2023, the same economic difficulties create openings for circular fashion businesses, and she cited Swag Kicks as an example. The money was also earmarked for inventory, wider market reach and technology to handle growing demand.
ThriftOps and the warehouse
The back end is a proprietary platform called ThriftOps, built in house. It tracks inventory, warehousing and purchasing, and, as Profit describes the software, it covers warehouse intake, tagging, pricing and listings. Khan told Gulf News what that meant for speed.
“What used to take us 40 minutes to process an order, now only takes 4 minutes with ThriftOps.”
Most of the seed money was meant for a bigger facility to sort, wash, disinfect, photograph and refurbish stock. The company said it would be the first of its kind in the world for processing thrift and vintage goods for resale.
Squeezed by the dollar
The 2023 currency crisis changed the arithmetic. Import costs rose, advertising priced in dollars climbed, and shoppers became more sensitive to price. Khan told Profit in March 2026 that the company "came dangerously close to shutting down altogether". He said break even needs a sale at roughly three times the sourcing cost: a sneaker bought for Rs100 has to sell for around Rs300 to cover marketing, logistics, warehousing, payment fees and salaries. In strong periods the markup reached four to four and a half times.
Khan told Aurora that the company buys everything in dollars and that prices have essentially doubled. Passing that on is risky, he said, because customers are still very price sensitive, so the company was leaning toward holding preloved Nikes at around Rs6,000 to Rs7,000. It had tried cheaper pairs at Rs2,500 to Rs3,000, but they did not last, and he said that hurt the brand.
Rather than discount, the company spent on community. It worked with break dancers, basketball players, mountaineers in Islamabad and hip hop artists in Karachi and Lahore, and Khan named Coca Cola and Red Bull as models for building a culture around a product. He said half the classrooms at institutions such as Karachi Grammar School shop with Swag Kicks, and described an athlete in Sukkur who cannot afford $200 shoes but buys a particular pair of Asics from the company.
“We made thrifting cool again by building a community and a culture around it.”
From shoe seller to software seller
The way out of those margins was the software. The tools built for warehouse intake, tagging, pricing and listings were later offered as a software as a service product to thrift retailers around the world, alongside the retail business. Khan told Aurora that the product is meant to be "something in Pakistan that we can export globally", and that major brands have approached the company for advice on how to sell their own preloved items. He named Nike, Adidas and Lululemon as brands moving into resale.
The retail side has not gone away. Khan told Aurora the aim is to be the biggest direct to consumer thrift brand in the world. Profit reported in March 2026 that revenue is split evenly between retail and software, the two halves of a company that began with one schoolboy looking for a pair of Jordans.
