Scents’n Stories – E-commerce Startup of the Year 2020

Meet Saad Afridi

Founder Scents\’n Stories

My Favourite Book:
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

My Favourite Movie:
The King’s Speech

My Favourite Quote:
A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships were built for.

I am Energized by:
Waking up at 5 AM, praying tahajjud, and doing zikr.

My Story

My Disappointments are:
I regret not finding good mentors in my journey, who would have guided me properly. What I find really good these days is that there are Facebook groups like Xtreme Commerce, which are really helpful for starters. I didn’t have that sort of support system back then.

I had always been interested in doing my own business. I read a lot of books from childhood since we didn’t have a TV at home. That habit continued into my undergrads where I read Martin Lindstrom, Malcolm Gladwell, and a few others related to Marketing and Business. During my studies, I took part in various business plan competitions and won a few. So I had this confidence that I will do a good job if I do my own thing. After graduation, I had a hard time finding the dream brand management job. Eventually had to settle as a Management Trainee at a rapidly growing supply chain organization, but it didn’t work out so I had to resign.

I started off with Beard Oils and Essential Oils, by the brands Wabees.com & AromaFarmacy.pk respectively. It was an unexplored niche. We were the first ones on Daraz which gave us a significant advantage. Later we extended perfume by the name of scentsnstories.com, which became our flagship venture with immense success. Currently, we are 20 employees, and we have been doubling our workforce every year. We are also about to launch our wizdomKingdom.com, a home decor niche, where we will sell frames with quotes. Another very interesting area we are working on is partnershipxperts.com where we will help business partners frame comprehensive partnership frameworks for a better partner relationship.

My Transformational Moment

When we launched scentsnstories.com, we had no idea it will grow so big, since fragrances is already a very mature and saturated market. We made some ads, thanks to my good copywriting skills, and they worked really well. We had to quickly ramp up our manufacturing, packaging, and customer service capabilities. Also, we currently deployed a custom ERP, which is again very transformative, since it is helping us gain a birds-eye view, and take better decisions.