Dear TSOLT Family,
I’ve read a lot of About Us pages, and almost every one put me off. It felt like talking to a wall, or reading something no real person had ever written. So I promised myself that if I ever wrote one, it would sound like a human talking to another human.
So here goes. (Dear husband says I’ll never manage to keep it short. Let’s see!)
I’m Rafia, and I made my first sale when I was a little girl. I found a very old istari behind a pile of debris at my nana’s house (it would have been a 100-year-old place, had it still been standing) and sold it to the kabadiya for Rs 20. I bought a pink plastic car with it and felt like the richest girl in the world. Of course, I didn’t know it then, but that was my first sale ever.
Many years later, I was teaching at LSE, and Anns was working full-time in IT after a hectic MBA from LUMS. My mom kept telling me to do something, and dear husband kept telling me that jobs alone wouldn’t be enough and we will build a business of our own. (I was the girl who ordered the same chicken tikka pizza for years because trying something new was too risky. A business? Me?)
Then we started furnishing homes for our family, and it was exhausting! Endless markets, endless waiting, and nowhere to simply look through pieces and choose.
That’s when the idea came... What if buying furniture could be easy? What if we could bring beautiful, thoughtfully made furniture to people without making the whole experience such a headache?
I had the idea, and Anns and I decided to build it together. I posted our first bed and we made Rs 5,000, and I was more excited than I had ever been about a salary!
It grew, slowly and then all at once.
Then 2020 came, and Covid almost took it all away. Orders stopped, the workshop went quiet, and for a while we honestly didn’t know if TSOLT would make it. It did, because of our team, who kept showing up when it would have been easier not to, and because of our customers, who supported us, waited patiently, ordered again and told their friends about us.
We will never forget that.
When outside workshops couldn’t keep up with our quality or our deadlines, we brought everything in-house, and in 2021 Anns left his job to join full time. (He traded his laptop for sawdust and still insists it was his idea.)
Today, around 50 people make TSOLT furniture with us. They are some of the most talented, hardworking people we have met, and also the funniest. When houndstooth fabric became popular, Anns explained that the pattern was named after a dog’s tooth. Ever since, in our workshop, houndstooth is simply “doggy T”.
It has been a topsy-turvy ride, and it still is! But it’s fun now, and it means something.
Every sofa and bed we make ends up in someone’s home, in the middle of their family’s life. We still worry about every piece as if it were going into our own home, because that’s how this all started.
And after seven years, here we are, finally making a website. (Some things take a little longer than planned!)
If you’re in Lahore, come and see us at 145 D, Phase 8, DHA. If you’re not, send us a message on WhatsApp. One of us will reply, probably while arguing about fabric.
From our family to yours,
Rafia & Anns
TSOLT Home