Back in 2014, two Scholastica schoolboys, Nahiyan Naser and his friend Rafe, printed a batch of posters featuring teams from that year’s FIFA World Cup and put them up for sale online. Friends and family were the first buyers, but what really got people talking was the name they had picked for the venture: Gorur Ghash, quite literally, “cow’s grass.”

“We named it Gorur Ghash simply because it was funny and stood out,” Naser recalled, adding that the pair figured a name that odd would be impossible for anyone to forget.

They were right. Twelve years on, Gorur Ghash has grown from a schoolboy poster stall into one of Bangladesh’s most recognisable homegrown clothing labels, with a customer base that now stretches well beyond the country’s borders.

The transformation was not part of any grand design. In 2017, Rafe moved on, and Fahim Islam Shetab and Ali Sakhi Khan stepped in, steering the business away from posters and into apparel. None of the three had any formal training in fashion. What followed was, by their own account, a long stretch of trial and error, starting with simple printed T-shirts before the brand worked its way up to jackets and dresses.

Money was tight and trust was tighter. Online retail in Bangladesh had not yet found its footing, and the pandemic-driven e-commerce boom was still years away. “We had to work real hard to earn the trust,” the founders said, crediting easy exchange and return policies with winning over early sceptics.

Then Covid-19 hit, just after the young company had signed its first office and warehouse lease. “Things looked really bleak for a few months,” they admitted. “We were paying rent for the space with little to no orders.” Rather than go quiet, the team leaned into their online presence, posting updates about the pandemic and even hosting “Among Us” game sessions with customers to keep the community alive through the lockdowns.

That instinct for humour over hard-sell messaging had already become something of a house style. Early ads for Gorur Ghash were less about the product and more about the joke, comedy skits inspired by YouTube channels like NigaHiga and Smosh, and by internet meme culture more broadly. For a long time, the strategy needed no paid promotion at all; virality did the heavy lifting until changes to Meta’s advertising algorithm eventually pushed the brand towards paid campaigns as well.

If one product came to define Gorur Ghash, it was the cord jacket. Drawing on 1980s styling, the first batch sold out almost immediately and had to be restocked repeatedly to keep pace with demand. “It quickly became our signature piece, season after season,” the founders said, noting with some amusement that the design has since been widely copied, turning up in boutique shops and larger retail chains alike every winter.

By 2020, word of the brand had travelled beyond Bangladesh, largely through customers abroad. Rising shipping costs, worsened by the pandemic and subsequent global conflicts, have made international fulfilment an ongoing headache, though the founders say overseas buyers remain willing to pay a premium. With Naser and Khan now based in the United States, the brand has begun laying groundwork for a more direct footprint in the American market.

Running a company for over a decade has also reshaped how its founders think about control. “It’s important to trust your team for growth,” they said, reflecting on the difficulty of letting go of processes they once handled personally. Their advice to young entrepreneurs hesitant to start is simple enough: the first step is always the hardest, and tuning out the noise of doubt matters more than having everything figured out.

Asked whether they would change anything about the journey, the answer was a flat no. The long-term goal now is straightforward, and ambitious: building Gorur Ghash into a Bangladeshi-origin brand with a genuine international presence.