Saba Gul is the Founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of BLISS.

Can you tell us a lit­tle bit about BLISS?

BLISS is ded­i­cated to edu­cat­ing girls in Pak­istan who are forced by poverty to choose work­ing over attend­ing school. It pro­vides mon­e­tary incen­tives for girls to go to school, imme­di­ately mak­ing it more finan­cially reward­ing than work, while simul­ta­ne­ously pro­vid­ing skills that increase their earn­ing poten­tial in the long term.

Girls par­tic­i­pat­ing in BLISS help pro­duce high-quality, trendy hand­bags to stay in school. The hand­bags are cre­ated as part of a skills class, which is a sup­ple­ment to con­ven­tional cur­ricu­lum. Girls spend an hour every day learn­ing embroi­dery and needle­work. The embroi­dered fab­ric is sent to local pro­duc­ers to be fin­ished into unique hand­bags that are retailed at high-end bou­tiques. Prof­its from the sales are used to com­pen­sate exist­ing stu­dents, recruit new stu­dents and cre­ate a sus­tain­able income stream for the com­mu­nity. The more hand­bags pro­duced and sold, the more stu­dents BLISS can edu­cate and train, thus cre­at­ing a “vir­tu­ous cycle.”

Over time, the girls and their moth­ers will also par­tic­i­pate in other parts of our value chain e.g. design and mar­ket­ing. Early next year, we are launch­ing a busi­ness and finan­cial lit­er­acy cur­ricu­lum to pro­vide the tools and train­ing for par­tic­i­pants to launch their own hand­crafts micro-enterprises.

What inspired you to start it?

I was trou­bled, time and again, by the vast social dis­par­i­ties preva­lent in Pak­istan, where I was born and raised. More recently, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at MIT, I was struck by the con­trast between myself and the mil­lions of Pak­istani girls who would never even get a basic edu­ca­tion. I heard one story that com­pelled me to visit the com­mu­nity that BLISS even­tu­ally chose as its pilot. This was the story of Aza­ada Khan. Azaad was a young girl who grew up in 1990s Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and masked her­self as a boy for 12 years so she could attend school in a regime under which girls were pun­ish­able by law for doing so. When I vis­ited this com­mu­nity, I could not for­get what I saw inside the homes—young girls labor­ing at car­pet looms for up to 14 hours every sin­gle day to sup­port their fam­i­lies. There was no time for any­thing else—no play, no social­iz­ing but most impor­tantly, no school. These girls and their fam­i­lies had been stuck in a cycle for gen­er­a­tions. They were illit­er­ate because they were poor, and they would stay poor because they were illiterate.

I firmly believe that the world can­not escape poverty if it does not har­ness the poten­tial of the 600 mil­lion girls that live in the devel­op­ing world today. And the first step is send­ing these girls to school. The prob­lem is too grave to ignore, and what can be achieved if we see our mis­sion to com­ple­tion is so incred­i­ble, that ded­i­cat­ing my life to this cause became a no-brainer for me.

What has been the biggest chal­lenge you have faced build­ing BLISS?

Build­ing a world-class team on a shoe­string budget!

We’re really early stage—I moved to Pak­istan 5 months ago to work on BLISS full-time. We launched our first line of hand­bags in May. After using up a few small seed grants, we boot­strapped, and now we’re rais­ing cap­i­tal. Mean­while, we need to keep build­ing the busi­ness, and to do that well, we need a stel­lar team. Find­ing cap­i­tal to pay this team and to sus­tain our oper­a­tions until we become cash-flow pos­i­tive has been one of our big challenges.

You were recently an Unrea­son­able Insti­tute fel­low, what was the most impor­tant thing you learned that you’ll take with you as you grow your organization?

Think big. And build to scale from the start.

As Unrea­son­able Fel­lows, we got men­tor­ship from world-class entre­pre­neurs and devel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers. Among them was Paul Polak, who has had exten­sive expe­ri­ence work­ing with poor com­mu­ni­ties. He talked about some basic prin­ci­ples for build­ing a busi­ness to scale. For exam­ple, out­source parts of your value chain that are not core com­pe­ten­cies. An unnec­es­sar­ily long value chain is a huge imped­i­ment when you start repli­cat­ing your model. Another prin­ci­ple is to not rely on a sin­gle rev­enue stream—this is an impor­tant one for us because at the moment we are focused solely on high-fashion hand­bags, which are part of a much more sea­sonal mar­ket than say, lap­top cases or wal­lets. As we grow, it’s impor­tant to both find other sources of rev­enue and diver­sify our prod­uct line.

Almost all the Unrea­son­able men­tors are at points in their careers where the Fel­lows, as bud­ding entre­pre­neurs, want to be one day. They have achieved what we aspire to achieve. And there was a com­mon denom­i­na­tor among all these mentors—they were not afraid to dream big, and to have auda­cious goals. The Unrea­son­able fel­lows all have inno­v­a­tive solu­tions to press­ing social prob­lems, but to make a dent, to become world-changers, they all need to think big. That is the first step to achiev­ing big impact!

Along the way, it’s also vital to build great rela­tion­ships with co-conspirators. These rela­tion­ships sus­tain your dreams, and sup­port your vision. One of the biggest tan­gi­ble take­aways from the Insti­tute has been the rela­tion­ships I’ve built this summer—with the other fel­lows, the Unrea­son­able team, and the mentors.

Where do you see Bliss in the next five years?

Our ulti­mate vision is of no girl left behind when it comes to edu­ca­tion, of every young girl able to define the course of her own life, and lift her­self, her fam­ily, and her com­mu­nity out of poverty. 5 years from now, we aim to impact the lives of 10,000 girls. In 5 years, I see BLISS run­ning an effi­cient busi­ness, becom­ing a brand that peo­ple talk about, part­ner­ing with top names in fash­ion and retail, and chang­ing lives in the process. I see our girls and women as suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs on the path to self-sufficiency. Beyond that, we also plan on scal­ing out­side Pakistan—other coun­tries in South Asia such as India and Bangladesh, as well as African nations that suf­fer from the same social prob­lem that we are tack­ling in Pakistan.

How can our read­ers help you push your mis­sion forward?

Vol­un­teer for us! We need help us with a vari­ety of things—among our top 2 needs right now are web devel­op­ment and fundraising.

• Con­nect us! If you know peo­ple who want to men­tor us, fund us, carry our hand­bags (retail­ers), write about us, please tell us know about them.
• Talk about us! Tell your friends, fam­ily, and col­leagues our story. You never know who’s in the audience.
• Write to us! We love hear­ing from peo­ple who sup­port our vision.

You can fol­low BLISS on Twit­ter @bagsforbliss or Face­book: http://facebook.com/bagsforbliss.