A tent manufacturer in Pakistan. Not a trader. Not a middleman.
We own and run a tent factory in Karachi. The same family has cut, stitched and shipped relief, military, hospital and canvas tents from this address since 1994. Direct line to UNHCR, ICRC, UNICEF and a dozen other procurement offices that have bought from us across thirty years of refugee responses, earthquakes, floods and military operations.
- Years in production
- 30+
- UN agency clients
- 9
- Tents per month (peak)
- 12K
- Airlift turnaround
- 72h
Verified UN suppliers · UNHCR · ICRC · UNICEF · UNDP · WFP · IOM · OXFAM · MDM · Red Cross / Red Crescent
A purpose-built tent line in Clifton, Karachi.
BNC's production facility sits in Clifton, Karachi , fifteen kilometres from Jinnah International Airport, twenty from Karachi Port. The proximity to both is deliberate: in 1994 my father and uncle built the company on the bet that humanitarian shelter would always need to move fast, and Karachi is the one Pakistani city where you can put product on a cargo plane the same day you finish the run.
Inside the gate is a tent line that has barely changed in shape over thirty years , heavy industrial sewing machines on long benches, cotton canvas in 510 GSM and 610 GSM rolls stacked along one wall, a cutting floor where 4m × 6m IFRC tarpaulin patterns get laid out twenty at a time, and an inspection station where every finished tent is pitched indoors and walked over by hand before it's folded into a transport bag.
We are a manufacturer in the literal sense , there is no second factory we subcontract to in China, no Alibaba storefront where the listings come from a different supplier each month. The address that appears on the export paperwork is the address where the work is done.
- Floor area
- ~3,500 m² across cutting + sewing + finishing
- Industrial machines
- ~80 (heavy-duty Juki, Pegasus, Singer)
- Canvas in stock
- 510 / 610 GSM cotton, ~25,000 running meters
- Dyeing & waterproofing
- In-house chrome / wax / silicone treatment line
- Peak monthly output
- ~12,000 small tents · ~2,500 large frame tents
- Workforce
- 80-250 depending on order book
- Lead time (ex stock)
- 72h to airlift; 5-7 days to container
Six product lines. One factory.
Each line is built to a different procurement standard. The same cutters and stitchers move between them depending on the order book , a UNHCR family relief tent run might be followed the next week by a Pakistan Army center-pole tent, then a school tent for the Sindh education department.
Disaster Relief Tents
UNHCR family relief tent (FRT) specification, IFRC double-fly relief tents, modular cluster tents. Cotton canvas, 350 g/m² roof, treated walls.
View specs →Military Tents
Center-pole army tents, frame marquees, command-post tents. 510 / 610 GSM canvas, custom for Pakistan Army, Bangladesh Army, friendly forces.
View specs →UNHCR Family Tents
To UNHCR FRT spec , 4.4m × 6.6m, cotton canvas, double-fly, winterised liner option. Manufactured for UNHCR procurement and re-export to in-country implementing partners.
View specs →Canvas Tents
Heavy-duty wall tents, ridge tents, glamping and event canvas. Made on the same line as the relief tents , same cotton, same finishing.
View specs →Camping Tents (Wholesale)
Safari, dome, party and scout tents. Wholesale quantities for camping retailers and tour operators across Pakistan, the Gulf, and East Africa.
View specs →Tarpaulins / Plastic Sheeting
IFRC/ICRC/IOM unified spec , 4m × 6m, 200 g/m², 500N tensile, EN 13823+A1 fire-retardant. The companion product to the relief tent line.
View specs →Six steps from confirmed order to a container clearing the gate.
The same sequence has run since the first UNHCR purchase order in the 1990s. We've added per-batch third-party assay reports along the way, but the production logic is unchanged.
PO confirmation + spec freeze
Within 24 hours of a purchase order, we lock the bill of materials , canvas weight, dimensions, fly configuration, eyelet spacing, marking requirements , and share it back to the buyer for sign-off. No production starts before this is countersigned.
Material in
Cotton canvas in 510 / 610 GSM, polyester webbing for guy lines, polyethylene laminated sheeting for the tarpaulin line, aluminium and steel hardware. Most stocked locally; specialty items (e.g. fire-retardant treatment chemistry) imported per run.
Cutting floor
Patterns cut twenty units at a time on a long table. The cutter teams have been on the line for an average of fourteen years , the same hands, same calibration, run after run.
Sewing & assembly
Heavy-duty industrial sewing on benches set up per product type. Relief tents and canvas tents on one line, military center-pole tents on another, tarpaulin laminate edge-binding on a third. Quality-pitch every fifth unit.
QA pitch + assay
Every fifth tent is pitched indoors and walked. Random sample sent to third-party lab for tensile, weight, and (for tarpaulins) fire-retardancy testing. Reports filed against the PO before shipment.
Pack-out & airlift / container
Folded into transport bags with poles and pegs. Palletised for air freight (DHL Aviation, Saudia Cargo, Turkish Cargo) or stuffed into 20ft / 40ft containers for surface freight via Karachi Port. Airlift consolidations reach destination airports in 24-72 hours.
Go deeper into the manufacturing record.
QA-checkpoint flow (intake / process / outbound), batch-ID traceability, per-product workflow timelines, and the ISO 9001 evidence path. The transparency layer behind the production sequence above.
The agencies that buy from BNC are the ones that wrote the standards everyone copies.
UN system
UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), UNICEF, UNDP, WFP, IOM, OCHA. Multi-year supply for refugee response in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan border belt, the 2010 floods, the 2022 Pakistan super-flood, and a steady backstop of stockpile rotation.
Red Cross / Red Crescent Movement
ICRC and IFRC, plus national societies , Pakistan Red Crescent, Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay), Bangladesh Red Crescent. ICRC was an early customer in the late 1990s and has continued through Yemen, Syria, and the 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquake response.
International NGOs
OXFAM, Médecins du Monde (MDM), ADRA (Adventist Development and Relief Agency), Muslim Aid, Islamic Relief, Save the Children, World Vision. Repeat orders across regions , when an NGO programme office finds a manufacturer that ships clean, the procurement repeats.
Government and military
Pakistan Army, Pakistan Frontier Corps, Pakistan Disaster Management Authority (NDMA / PDMA), Sindh Education Department, plus friendly-force military procurement (Bangladesh, GCC states). Military-grade canvas tents are a substantial share of the order book, separate from the humanitarian pipeline.
Direct supply to UNHCR, ICRC and PDMA in the immediate sixty-day relief window. Production line ran around the clock.
Multi-agency consolidation through OXFAM, ICRC and the WFP cluster. Tents and tarpaulins moved to Sindh and Punjab in two waves.
Tents-and-tarpaulin combination supply to NDMA, IOM and ten implementing INGOs. Some tarpaulins still in field service.
Steady supply through UNHCR Afghanistan and Pakistan country offices for nearly thirty years of cross-border movement.
Canvas tents and tarpaulins consolidated through Kızılay (Turkish Red Crescent) and IFRC, airlift via Saudia Cargo and Turkish Cargo.
Multi-year ICRC and OXFAM stockpile rotation. The same factory manages re-stock cycles even when active conflict pauses.
There are roughly six tent manufacturers in Pakistan. There are several hundred tent traders.
If you have spent time on Alibaba or IndiaMART searching for "Pakistani tent supplier," you have noticed how many storefronts list nearly identical products at nearly identical prices. Most of them are trading offices , they take an inquiry, walk it down to one of the actual manufacturers, mark it up fifteen to twenty per cent, and re-export under their own letterhead. The product passes through three sets of hands; the buyer pays twice, learns nothing about the production line, and has no recourse if something fails inspection at port.
A manufacturer is the address where the canvas gets cut. We are one of those addresses. Our gate, our looms, our payroll. The contact you reach on WhatsApp at 11pm in Karachi (which is 5pm in London, noon in New York, 8pm in Dubai) is the same person who quoted the order, ran the production schedule, and will sign off on the assay report before the container leaves.
For procurement officers , particularly UN and INGO buyers operating to strict ISO 9001 supplier-qualification standards , the practical implication is fewer hops in the documentation chain. Country of origin, manufacturing site, and supplier of record are all the same legal entity. That simplifies the export paperwork, the country-of-origin certificate, and (when you need it) the audit trail back through ten years of orders.
Buyers are welcome at the factory. The walk-through takes about ninety minutes and answers most of the questions a procurement file asks before it can sign off on a new supplier.
Pilot order or a multi-thousand-unit campaign , same number, same person, same factory.
Tell us volume, destination, INCOTERMS, and which spec you're working to. We come back the same business day with a quote and the relevant certifications attached.