It started with being told to look from a distance.

When a new mall opened in our city, I was still a boy, and perfume was already the thing I loved most.

I went in to look at the fragrances. I was told to look from a distance. It was a small moment, and I have never forgotten it.

I made myself a promise that day. One day I would build a perfume brand of my own, and nobody would be sent away from it.

A fragrance should welcome you closer.

At the end of 2023, with very little money and a lot of stubbornness, I started.

I collected empty perfume bottles and had them filled in Lahore. I sold them under my own initials, IA Fragrance. I was the developer, the designer and the seller. I will be honest with you: not one of those scents moved me.

So I saved what I earned and kept studying perfume, week after week, until I knew exactly what I wanted to make.

I wanted more than a perfume. I wanted a fashion house.

A place where the things that are hard to find in Pakistan can be found easily, the way people find them at the great houses of the world. Fragrance is where we begin, and it is still the part we are perfecting.

With a small team, we searched for a name until BlackBird felt right. Then I searched for perfumers, spent more than I had planned, and had several fragrances made as Eau de Parfum with a high concentration of oil.

The first packaging was simpler than I had hoped for. I decided the fragrance would have to speak louder than the box.

Of everything we made, one fragrance stood apart.

Office Hours is fresh and citrusy, made for Pakistani weather, and it lasts. People began to ask what I was wearing. First friends, then strangers.

A classmate asked about it during an exam, and the next day he bought two testers. His father liked it so much that he came back for a full bottle.

A neighbour across the road caught the scent of my brother leaving for Friday prayer, and came to my shop the next morning asking for it. I let him smell another fragrance first. “No, not that one.” When I handed him Office Hours, he said, “Yes, that is it.”

One batch sold out, then the next, each time in a better bottle at the same price.