Design Strategy
What good design is actually worth to a Pakistani business.
The largest study ever conducted on design and financial performance found that the best design performers grow at nearly twice the rate of their competitors. The number of Pakistani brands acting on that finding is a fraction of the number that could. That gap is the opportunity.
Most conversations about design in Pakistan get stuck on the wrong question. Founders ask what a logo costs. What a website costs. What a month of content costs. These are reasonable questions, but they treat design as an expense to be minimised rather than an investment to be measured. The more useful question, the one almost nobody asks, is the one this article is about: what is good design actually worth?
It turns out there is a real answer, backed by the most rigorous research ever done on the subject. And once you have seen the number, it is hard to keep thinking about design the way most Pakistani businesses currently do.
The number nobody in Pakistan is talking about
In 2018, McKinsey published The Business Value of Design, the conclusion of what the firm described as the most extensive research undertaken to that point on how design drives financial results. The scale of the study is worth pausing on. McKinsey tracked 300 publicly listed companies across multiple countries and industries over five years. The team collected more than two million pieces of financial data and recorded over 100,000 individual design actions, then used regression analysis to find which actions correlated most strongly with financial performance.
The headline finding is the part you should remember. Companies in the top quarter of McKinsey's design index increased their revenues and total shareholder returns substantially faster than their industry peers over the five-year period. Specifically, McKinsey reported 32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher shareholder return growth for the top performers compared to the rest of their industry.
Two details make this more useful than the usual "design is important" claim. First, McKinsey found the pattern held across three very different industries: medical technology, consumer goods, and retail banking. Whether a company sold physical products, digital products, or services, strong design correlated with stronger financial performance. Second, and this is the part Pakistani founders should sit with, the difference between the second, third, and fourth quartiles was marginal. The market did not reward companies for being slightly better than average at design. It rewarded the companies that genuinely stood out.
That last point is the entire argument for how design works in a crowded market. Being a bit better than your competitor is worth almost nothing. Being unmistakably different is worth nearly double the growth.
Why this matters more in Pakistan right now than it did five years ago
You could have read the McKinsey study in 2018 and reasonably concluded it was about large Western corporations with design budgets bigger than your entire company. That excuse has expired. The Pakistani market has changed in three specific ways that make the business value of design a local, immediate question rather than a distant one.
The market is large and growing fast
Pakistan's e-commerce market reached an estimated 14.1 billion US dollars in value in 2025, and grew at a compound annual rate of more than 22 percent across the 2020 to 2024 period, according to market data compiled by ResearchAndMarkets. Source: Pakistan B2C Ecommerce Databook, Q4 2025 update.
That growth is not slowing to a crawl either. Forecasts put continued expansion well into the second half of the decade. For a brand, this means two things at once. There is more demand than ever, and there are more businesses than ever competing for it. A rising market attracts entrants. Every category that was sleepy five years ago now has a dozen brands fighting for the same customer.
Your customer is on a phone, deciding in seconds
More than 70 percent of Pakistan's e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. Your brand is not being evaluated on a billboard or in a showroom with a salesperson present to explain it. It is being judged on a five-inch screen, in a feed full of competitors, by someone who will decide in under three seconds whether to stop scrolling. Design is the entire interface between your business and that decision. There is nothing else doing that job.
The categories are genuinely crowded
Consider fashion, Pakistan's most visible consumer category. The market is full of established names: Khaadi, Sapphire, Gul Ahmed, Limelight, Nishat Linen, Sana Safinaz, Alkaram, Generation, Bonanza Satrangi, and dozens more, with new direct-to-consumer labels launching constantly. Apparel alone accounts for the single largest share of online stores in Pakistan. A customer in this category is not short of options. They are drowning in them.
In a market this saturated, the McKinsey finding becomes very concrete. Being the tenth competent lawn brand is worth very little. Being the one brand a customer can describe to a friend without showing them a photo is worth almost everything. That difference is created by design, or it is not created at all.
In a crowded market, being slightly better than your competitor is worth almost nothing. Being unmistakably different is worth nearly double the growth.
What "good design" actually means, according to the data
Here is where most discussions of design go wrong, and where the McKinsey research is most useful. When a founder hears "invest in design," they usually picture a nicer logo or a more polished website. That is not what the study found drives results. McKinsey clustered the design actions that correlated with financial performance into four themes, and not one of them is about making things prettier.
1. Treat design with the same rigour as revenue and cost
The best-performing companies measured design with the same seriousness they applied to their financials. This sounds abstract until you see the example McKinsey gives: one online gaming company found that a small increase in the usability of its home page was followed by a 25 percent jump in sales. Design was not a matter of taste. It was a measurable lever on revenue. Most Pakistani businesses have no way to measure whether their design is working at all, which is exactly the gap McKinsey identified. Across the companies it surveyed, more than half admitted they had no objective way to assess the output of their design teams.
2. Design the whole experience, not just the product
Top performers broke down the walls between the physical product, the digital interface, and the service around it. For a Pakistani D2C brand, this is the difference between a brand that has a nice logo and a brand where the Instagram feed, the website, the packaging, the unboxing, the WhatsApp reply, and the delivery experience all feel like the same business. The customer does not experience your logo. They experience the whole journey. McKinsey found the companies that designed that entire journey, rather than isolated pieces of it, were the ones that pulled ahead.
3. Make design everyone's job, not a side department
The research found one of the strongest correlations between financial performance and companies that integrated designers with the rest of the business rather than isolating them in a silo. For a small Pakistani brand, this is actually an advantage you have over large corporations. When the founder, the person running ads, and the person designing are close together, design decisions and business decisions are the same conversation. The danger is treating design as something you outsource and forget, disconnected from how the business actually runs.
4. Test, learn, and iterate with real users
The final theme was continuous iteration: putting work in front of real users early and often, rather than perfecting something in isolation and launching it once. McKinsey notes that nearly 60 percent of the companies it surveyed only used prototypes late in development, for internal testing. The best performers shared rough work early and refined based on real reactions. For a Pakistani brand, your audience is already giving you this data for free, in comments, in messages, in what sells and what does not. The question is whether you are designing in response to it or ignoring it.
McKinsey found that when senior executives were asked to name their company's single greatest design weakness, 98 percent of their unprompted answers mapped to these same four themes. In other words, leaders already sense where their design is failing. The gap is not awareness. It is the willingness to treat design as a business priority rather than a finishing touch.
The Pakistani founder's real objection
At this point a sensible founder pushes back. "This is McKinsey studying companies with hundred-million-dollar revenues. I run a brand with a small team and a tight budget. How does any of this apply to me?"
It applies more directly to you than to them, for one reason. McKinsey's own research found that the most effective first step was not to overhaul design across an entire company. It was to pick one important product or service and commit to getting the design right on that single thing. The company that did this saw far better results than companies that tried to spread design improvements thinly across everything at once.
A small Pakistani brand is, in effect, already that single focused pilot. You do not have the problem of a large organisation trying to change design culture across forty departments. You have one brand, one identity, one customer experience to get right. The thing McKinsey identified as the ideal starting point is the only thing you have. That is not a disadvantage. It is the most favourable possible position from which to act on this research.
What this means in practice
If the data is right, and it is about as well-evidenced as business research gets, then the way most Pakistani brands think about design has the equation backwards. Design is not the thing you do once the product and the marketing are sorted. It is one of the few levers that correlates with growing at twice the rate of the businesses you are competing against.
That does not mean spending more. It means treating design as a decision that affects revenue rather than a cosmetic afterthought. Concretely, for a Pakistani brand, that looks like:
- Building a brand identity from what is actually true and different about your business, rather than what looks good on a competitor's feed. In a market full of brands that look like each other, the only defensible position is the one nobody else can copy.
- Making sure the entire experience is coherent, from the graphic design to the website to the social media, so a customer recognises you across every touchpoint without being told.
- Treating design as connected to how the business runs and how it sells, not as a service you buy once and disconnect from everything else.
- Paying attention to what your audience actually responds to and designing in answer to it, rather than perfecting things in isolation.
None of this requires a McKinsey budget. It requires deciding that design is worth treating seriously, which the evidence says it overwhelmingly is. The brands that internalise this in Pakistan over the next few years, while the market is still growing fast and most competitors still treat design as decoration, are the ones that will be impossible to compete with later.
That is the entire reason TDD exists, and the belief underneath everything we build. Not the best version of something that already exists. The only version of something a customer cannot stop thinking about. The data simply confirms what we already knew: in a crowded market, being unmistakable is not a luxury. It is the most valuable thing a brand can own.