Saiful Tanvir 

The story starts in the fifth grade, with a national board exam and a scholarship. Saiful placed second in the entire country — a result that shocked his family and came with something transformative for a young student: funding. By the eighth-grade board exam he had placed fourth nationally, earning a fully free education.

At university he graduated first in his class, took the national gold medal for his degree, and set the highest marks in the university’s history — a record that still stands. He finished both his bachelor’s and master’s summa cum laude, each with a special certificate and gold medal.

Rather than staying in the lecture hall, Saiful accepted an offer from a garment factory to help with development — and set about learning every segment of the industry from the inside. He went on to specialise in garment manufacturing, adding a double degree in fashion design.

His academic record kept pace with the factory floor: three Master’s degrees in the textile and clothing field, more than 17 published international research journals, and recognition that ranged from national gold medals to international awards.

His bachelor’s institution offered him a faculty position, and for roughly five years Saiful ran a dual career: merchandising for an international buying house by day, teaching as the region’s most junior assistant professor at the same time.

He supervised and assisted a generation of student researchers, and was named best university faculty three years in a row.

Saiful published an academic textbook on merchandising through Lambert (Germany) — still used as a course text at many universities for students entering the textile and fashion industries.

He also earned the CSCM — Certified Supply Chain Manager — from the International Supply Chain Education Alliance in the USA, becoming the youngest certified supply chain manager in his Asian region at the time.

Since 2005, Saiful has worked every link of the industry’s supply chain: backward linkage, international conversion connecting first-nation buyers with factories, and now the forward linkage as a buyer himself. At each stop he was, in his words, the initiator — the person driving the developments that grew the business.

Inspection expertise became a signature of his career, and with it constant travel — to nearly every first-nation country and many more. He calls the practical learning from that travel the equivalent of several more master’s degrees. He moved to the US in 2021 after years in Germany, fielding multiple offers before joining Twillery.

Career stability was never the whole goal — Saiful wanted the freedom to contribute directly, to give people a genuinely new experience. Faraja’s products offered exactly that: a garment engineered around the community that knows this culture best, built on the conviction that the feel of a garment outlasts its looks.

Fabric is responsible for almost 90% of how a garment feels — which is why Faraja starts there, engineering the textile itself to deliver that first “wow” and the retention that follows. Satisfied customers, he insists, are the company’s biggest asset.