Umaimah Sharwani is the founder of Paro, a South Asian comfort food brand bringing authentic Pakistani recipes to the American mainstream market. A first-generation Pakistani American who previously scaled digitally native brands like Glossier, Bravo Sierra, and Jet.com, Umaimah launched Paro after years of product development. The brand is named after her mother and features family recipes for Masoor Daal, Kitchari, and Tarka oil.
🔧 Heritage Product Development Framework - Process for adapting authentic cultural recipes for mainstream American consumers while maintaining cultural integrity
📊 Cultural Category Creation Strategy - Approach to educating consumers about unfamiliar cuisine categories and building awareness for new food concepts
🤝 DTC-to-Retail Transition Planning - Framework for scaling from direct-to-consumer to retail distribution in specialty food categories
⚙️ Specialty Co-Manufacturing Management - Method for finding and managing manufacturing partners for non-standard ingredient combinations and cultural cooking processes
📈 Heritage Supply Chain Optimization - Strategy for sourcing authentic specialty ingredients while managing costs and inventory complexity
🎯 Community-Driven Customer Acquisition - Approach to turning cultural storytelling and community engagement into scalable customer acquisition
Whether you're building heritage brands or introducing new cultural categories to market, Umaimah's frameworks will help you balance authenticity with accessibility while building operational systems that scale.
Perfect for: Heritage brand founders, cultural food entrepreneurs, DTC-to-retail operators, specialty food developers
Guest: Umaimah Sharwani - Founder, Paro
Host: Samantha Rose - Managing Partner, Hologram Capital & Founder, Endless Commerce
This episode was recorded live and is part of our series on operational frameworks that drive real business results. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
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Look, we've all heard the polished founder story—the perfect pitch, the seamless scale, the overnight success. But what about the time you oversold by 100K units? Or when your 'seamless' integration crashed right before Black Friday?
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Welcome to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for founders who knows that building a real business is beautifully, chaotically messy.