I can’t think of a creative title for this one

An unusual tale of entrepreneurship from Pakistan:

If the bondage business seems an unlikely pursuit for two button-down, slightly awkward, decidedly deadpan lower-class Pakistanis, it is. But then, discretion has been their byword. The brothers have taken extreme measures to conceal a business that in this deeply conservative Muslim country is as risky as it is risqué.

It helps that the dozens of veiled and uneducated female laborers who assemble the handmade items — gag balls, lime-green corsets, thonged spanking skirts — have no idea what the items are used for. Even the owners’ wives, and their conservative Muslim mother, have not been informed.

…Even customs officials were perplexed at how to tax the items, not quite sure what they were, they said.

Perhaps it’s a pithy premise for a story, but the article paints a pretty thoughtful picture of innovation and entrepreneurship at work:

In 2001, after the brothers graduated from a university, their father lent them $800, enough to purchase their first computer and to cover several months of rent on a studio apartment. There, the brothers searched the Internet day and night for a high-value garment product that was not widely available.

They experimented with basic leather goods, like jackets and pants. Adnan slept at mosquito-infested stitching factories to oversee sample runs that, in the end, proved more costly than their Chinese competitors.

…Then, they discovered a kind of straitjacket online. At first, they thought it was used for psychiatric patients, but it quickly led them to learn about the lucrative fetish industry.

Schumpeter would be proud.

But the best line in the article?

Their market research, they said, showed that 70 percent of their customers were middle- to upper-class Americans, and a majority of them Democrats.