he wanted to understand how they were made. He studied the shell, the texture, the filling, and the sauces, then worked backwards until he could recreate the whole thing from scratch for his friends and family.
He still does it today with anything good enough to make him pause: He’ll take it apart, make it his own, then share it.
At Berkeley, where he studied engineering, that instinct moved from the kitchen to the lab and hardened into something he could build a career on. The curiosity didn’t go anywhere — it just found a bigger stage.
When the iPhone arrived, Suleman saw the gap before most retailers: ecommerce was still built for desktop, but customers had already started moving to mobile. He joined Moovweb and helped build and optimize more than 70 mobile sites for brands like Macy’s, Walmart, and Forever 21.
From there, his curiosity brought him to 1-800-Flowers.com as the VP of Product, where he examined and dissected customer expectations around speed and performance, leading to the development of one of the industry’s first Progressive Web Apps.
Suleman’s desire to understand how things work also helped him find the connection between marketing, web, and app, which allowed him to integrate acquired brands like Harry & David and Shari’s Berries into one seamless experience.
That same eye brought him
to Uncommon Goods,
a founding B Corp selling
handmade goods from
independent makers.
He wasn’t just drawn to the work; he was drawn to what the work stood for — using business as a force for good, supporting creative entrepreneurs, and building something that actually means something.
To Suleman, ecommerce’s current AI moment feels like a familiar challenge. Such a big platform shift presents a great opportunity to be curious and see where the gaps are (and how to get ahead of everyone else).
At Uncommon Goods, that’s meant collapsing the distance between idea and execution — by understanding what they wanted to achieve, could they take projects that once took months and turn them around in less than half the time?
One example is The Story of You, an interactive experience that guides someone through writing their own memoir and turns it into a printed book — built start to finish by the internal team. As ambitions grew, so did the questions Suleman put in front of his organization:
How long does it typically take your team to go from idea to execution?
What’s possible with the tools available? And above all, what’s actually worth doing?
A big part of having a curious nature is putting everything to the test to see what sticks. That’s why, heading into the 2025 holiday season, Suleman’s team ran two parallel tests with Loomi — one on site search, one on category ranking. The results were hard to argue with.
Loomi delivered a 2% RPV lift on search. Meanwhile, the Uncommon Goods-specific category ranking algorithm, trained on its own behavioral data, delivered a 6% RPV lift on product listing pages, which is where the majority of the brand’s revenue lives.
How confident are you in the ranking logic on your product listing pages?
The instinct that started in a kitchen in Pakistan has never really been about technology or ecommerce or even product.
For Suleman, it’s always been about bringing delight to the people around him — understanding what they need before they can name it, building experiences that make them feel seen, and always chasing ways to make them even better.
That was true when Suleman was reverse-engineering gol gappay for his friends and family, and it’s still true today, at the helm of one of ecommerce’s most mission-driven companies.
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“I just like helping people. You help them win, then you win.”
Suleman Rehmani
His team at Uncommon Goods can now work with smarter discovery, less manual overhead, and consistently strong peak season results.
For Suleman, the endless curiosity has never gone away, but the technology is finally advanced enough to allow him to be curious to his full potential and do what he does best: take it apart, build it better, and repeat.
When was the last time you took apart a process or campaign just to understand why it worked?
Your result
Story 03 / 08
Head of CRM, Hornby Hobbies
