Entrepreneurship requires human agency and Nepal's readymade garment industry cannot be an exception. In 1981, Shah Safari, a Seattle-based distributor of Indian ethno-contemporary garments, entered Nepal looking for a cheap franchise. The company was owned by two ethnic Gujarati brothers from Kenya, Raj and Akhil Shah. They decided to not set up their own factories in Kathmandu. Instead, they opened a purchasing house that contracted a dozen or so Nepali businessmen to manufacture garments following their designs. This venture was an instant success, and, within a few years, quite a few garment factories had sprung up in Kathmandu to take orders from Shah Safari. Shah Safari designs combined casual American styles with Indian fabrics and silhouettes. Public curiosity about the spiritual retreat of the Beatles in Hrishikesh, near Nepal, helped set a new fashion trend among Westerners for loose oriental garments, such as ‘Madras’ plaid shirts and festooned clothes with oriental screen-print graphics. Riding this new wave of celebrity hipsterism, and working for patrons like Hollywood icon Kevin Costner who once bought everything left on their shelves, Shah Safari went on to capture as much as a quarter of the market share on the US West Coast, for the basic clothing item of young men's woven tops. They went on to set up buying houses in Korea, China, Bangladesh, and, of course, Nepal.

Although Shah Safari was a designer label, it followed a production model associated with mass manufacturing: of strictly disconnecting design from production. All of its designing work was done in-house in Seattle, while the suppliers abroad simply replicated the samples provided. The central feature of this production model was that most of the profit remained in the hands of those who copyrighted the designs rather than those who manufactured the products. This new fetish of design gave the impression of a new economic order connecting opposite ends of the world, even if production was fragmented across the boundaries of state and class (Dale, 2010). Manufacturers in the Third World, including those in Nepal, tried to break into the designing side of production, but it turned out to be lot more difficult than envisaged. Below, I narrate this problem from the perspective of a young garment businessman who I came to know well during my fieldwork in Kathmandu.