In this episode, join us on our call with Qing Gui Huang, CEO and co-founder of Thailand’s leading ecommerce platform for beauty brands Konvy. With 1,000+ brands representing an SKU selection of more than 20,000 on its platform, with the likes L’Oréal, Shiseido, Sulwhasoo, Eucerin, La Roche-Posay and many more on their portfolio, we pick the brains of Qing Gui on the evolution of Thailand’s ecommerce and beauty spaces, the role of omnichannel innovation in ecommerce, internationalization, as well as developing adaptability as a Chinese entrepreneur building a capital-efficient technology business in Thailand over the past 10 years — he also shares his skincare routine.

Konvy is hiring! Check out open roles here. 

We recently welcomed them to the Insignia family with a US$10 million Series A round on top of their momentum as a leading online beauty retail platform connecting 1000+ brands from L’Oreal to AmorePacific to local brands to millions of consumers.

Highlights and Timestamps

(01:42) Perks of Being a First Mover in a Foreign Land;

“We didn’t want to just bring a business model from foreign countries and just plug it in. You really need to look into the market’s needs and beauty is something that the Thai market really enjoys and is really investing a lot of money into.”

(06:59) What Innovation Means to the Preferred Partner for Beauty Brands in Thailand;

“The Thai market is about four to five billion US dollars — that’s the market size for beauty. And there are so many brands…while we do want to help every brand, but our capability is limited…Based on our very initial understanding of the brands, we can create campaigns to trial with our customers. And Konvy has a very deep database, and we’re heavily investing into data mining, understanding our customer behaviors and customer segmentations.”

(15:36) Enabling Beauty Brands to Expand, from Thailand to the Rest of the World;

“Whenever a brand comes to Southeast Asia, big brands, they will put Thailand as the first place that they should conquer, and the reason why is not the population, but the well-established beauty markets…Whenever there’s huge competition going on in the market, a company like us as an intermediary or a platform where we try to connect both customers and brands by providing more efficient ways, more cost-efficient ways to connect these two people become a very valuable thing to have.”

(19:48) Unlocking Omnichannel and its Ties to Cost-Efficiency;

“I came to the realization that the value of Konvy is not that we are the most valuable or biggest platform to be in the market, but the things that we are doing for the consumers and for the brands, that is what our value lies on…Konvy has to be in the position that we have to foresee the behavior of consumers and adapt ourselves and be there for the next generations. And the word omnichannel means that Konvy doesn’t have to be just on one platform. Konvy has to innovate to be the platform that the future is going to be.”

(24:54) What Adaptability Means for Leadership;

“Sometimes it’s not about you trying to change the world, but for yourself, you have to start understanding the market that you’re running in into first, and adapting yourself.”

(30:38) Rapid Fire Round;

“These three things are my new habits now, whenever I have some extra time and whenever I think about giving myself some time for my own health. For entrepreneurs, just newly into this new startup business, one day you will need to ask yourself, and you will face this problem, and you need to get into it earlier than later. And we still have another 40 years to go. So let’s get it long. Imagine, right, that the company is already 10 years old. And most people are already down after three to four years. And for ourselves, us having the stamina to be able to keep up last 10 years already wins 90% of the competitors.”

About our guest

Qing Gui Huang is CEO and co-founder of Thailand ecommerce beauty brand platform Konvy. He is a US-educated Chinese serial entrepreneur who, after building online fashion businesses in Beijing, in 2011 he moved to Thailand spotting the opportunity to start an ecommerce platform for beauty brands which he did in 2012 with his co-founders through Konvy. He received his Bachelors’ in Management and International Business from Purdue University. 

Transcript

Perks of Being a First Mover in a Foreign Land

Paulo: Let’s dial back a little bit to 2012, I mentioned, when you decided to pack your bags and move to Thailand. What was the thinking behind that? What were you seeing in the market and why did you decide to focus specifically on beauty?

Gui: I have always enjoyed being an entrepreneur. So when I was young, I already started to do little businesses. I actually started being a salesman when I was 12, and throughout the last 20 years, I have ventured into quite a multiple businesses. The last one I have had which is Konvy and it’s not a very new company anymore.

We have been doing this business for more than ten years, and the reason why I actually gave up on what I was doing in Beijing, but moved to Thailand was that I saw a huge opportunity of the ecommerce potential in Southeast Asia. And this was back in 2011. Konvy was the first vertical ecommerce platform in Thailand.

And I had multiple ecommerce background experiences back then, when I was in China and when I was in US as well, and I saw that Thailand had absolutely no ecommerce at all. And I saw that there was a huge opportunity, necessity, and possibility for this business. Then I just packed with my brother and we both came to Thailand to start this business. 

And the reason why we jumped into beauty is that if we really look into ecommerce landscape right now, it’s not that every category is suitable for online platforms, and online platforms help business in different ways. 

But in terms of retail, not every category is suitable for e-commerce. And the time we came to Thailand, we did a lot of research into fashion; we were looking into shoes; we were looking into baby and moms category; we were looking at the pet categories. We were looking into multiple categories and we thought that beauty is a category that is suitable for Thailand.

And we didn’t want to just bring a business model from foreign countries and just plug it in. You really need to look into the market’s needs and beauty is something that the Thai market really enjoys and is really investing a lot of money into. That’s why we jumped into this category.

“We didn’t want to just bring a business model from foreign countries and just plug it in. You really need to look into the market’s needs and beauty is something that the Thai market really enjoys and is really investing a lot of money into.”

Paulo: I actually was curious since you started back in 2011, you were already doing all this research with your co-founders, and you zeroed in on beauty, how has that ecommerce environment from literally a blue ocean to now you have so many players, so many different forms of ecommerce, and I remember in a past panel that you did, you mentioned that ecommerce will soon be no longer ecommerce anymore, the way that people look at ecommerce will change. So for Thailand in particular, how has the ecommerce space evolved over the past 10 years? 

Gui: I started this business when I was 24 and back then, if you talked about e-commerce, I started a business and a year or two into the business, I was looking for investors and I had the opportunity to pitch to quite a lot of investors and they were just not into e-commerce.

All of them didn’t think that it would work with the offline retail business being so strong in Thailand. It’s just like how we think about metaverse right now, if you really think about it. I was pitching to them that I wanted to be the first to build an ecommerce platform in Thailand.

It was so difficult for them to believe, so we had to do it on our own with our own savings, and with a few friends’ help. We just started the business that way without any venture investments. We just started with, let’s say 20,000, 30,000 US dollars. That’s all we had. 

So I had to literally learn — luckily I have a programming background so I have to put myself as a developer into developing our own website in that time. But after the years passed, you can see that from the very beginning when we were just a small entrepreneur-founded business in a blue ocean, later on, let’s say 2015 or 2016 when ecommerce started to pick up in the region, you see Lazada and Shopee becoming dominant players, and by that time people started to accept ecommerce more, knowing what e-commerce is, until the pandemic started to hit the markets and people started to turn their understanding that, you know what, maybe ecommerce is gonna be the thing. So a lot of traditional businesses started to venture into ecommerce, venture into online platforms, and venture into technology.

And then today, 2022, you start to talk about ecommerce and there is nothing new anymore. People start to talk about something else. This is the time when we can see that ecommerce is not something new, but something that has a scalability to become big, and we are becoming a significant player in the market now, somewhat competing with the offline market and competing with very big players in the market. How the company or myself as a founder has to adapt to these environments and to adapt to face new challenges like this is very difficult and it’s very challenging but also fun.

“We can see that ecommerce is not something new, but something that has scalability to become big, and we are becoming a significant player in the market now, somewhat competing with the offline market and competing with very big players in the market. How the company or myself as a founder has to adapt to these environments and to adapt to face new challenges like this is very difficult and it’s very challenging but also fun.”

What Innovation Means to the Preferred Partner for Beauty Brands in Thailand

Paulo: One thing that you did mention is that obviously there’s a lot more — I would say the market has become more complex and sophisticated over the years, so how would you place Konvy in the current sort of beauty industry?

And not just e-commerce, so I’m also talking about even the offline traditional retail, where does Konvy place itself? And especially considering that you guys aren’t necessarily replacing brands, you are supporting brands, helping them reach more customers, so where would you place Konvy right now given where the beauty industry is in Thailand?

Gui: To dig down this question a little bit more, we have to come back to what the reason why we started Konvy. So in the very beginning, it was the consumers who were looking for accessibility to brands and products. And Thailand is a very sophisticated beauty market. We have tons of brands comparable to countries like the US and China.

We have so many brands, a lot more than Vietnam, a lot more than Indonesia, where the population is quadruple of what Thailand has right now. So with so many brands in the market, the problem that brands are facing and consumers are facing is that they’re not being able to access all these brands, even though the offline is so strong, 7/11s and shopping malls are heavily built in Thailand, let’s say there’s 3000, 4,000 beauty brands in the market. Most of them do not have the privilege to be able to sell in these offline channels. They have to invest a ton of money if they want to sell there.

And that is where Konvy came into place in the very beginning to try to solve this problem, about being a channel for them to list their products. But until now, as I mentioned earlier, the landscape changed from a blue ocean to now where e-commerce is widely understandable. Our position changed as well.

We are facing new challenges from the brands. And brands start to ask, now marketing cost is getting really expensive, and they have trouble getting to the customers. It’s not about accessibility, but having a channel to communicate, or to educate the customer about what their brand is really about.

Being a discovery channel for consumers and being the platform to connect consumers and brands has become our new position now. So we have been talking with brands, and discussing in depth what are their challenges? What is the stage that they’re facing right now?

Are they a new brand in the markets or are they a brand that is launching new products? We are taking in these kinds of questions and we’re trying to solve them with new technologies that we’re launching. So Konvy has continued to evolve with the technology that we’re bringing to the consumer.

Our existing technology might not be able to solve those problems anymore. That’s why we’re relaunching and re-innovating new technology, new functions, and new features that would fit and solve the current consumer needs.

“…that is where Konvy came into place in the very beginning to trying to solve this problem, about being a channel for them to list their products…Being a discovery channel for consumers and being the platform to connect consumers and brands has become our new position now…So we have been talking with brands, and discussing in depth that what are their challenges…We are taking in these kind of questions and we’re trying to solve with new technologies that we’re launching.”

Paulo: Do you have an example of that that you can talk about already?

Gui: So we’ve recently launched a channel called Brand Voice. I just had a meeting with some of the big groups, big beauty brands like L’Oreal and AmorePacific. And we hear that in the past they heavily used channels like Facebook and Instagram to be a place to communicate with their consumers.

But now as the algorithm starts to change for all these social media platforms, whenever they wanna talk to their fan clubs, they have to pay. They have to pay a lot of money, and in most cases, they can’t even reach to their fan club even by paying money, so now the channel for them to communicate with their customer is gone. And I thought about it, and with Konvy being the leading platform in Thailand for this purpose already, we can solve this problem for them.

So because of that Konvy is creating a new feature in the platform called the Brand Voice. This allows the brands to push to these few million customers we have throughout the whole platform.

And specifically, they can target an audience who can be the followers of their brand as well directly. They can have the feature to send a push notification to them; they can send SMS to them; it becomes a very effective and cost-efficient function for brands.

“…in the past brands heavily used channels like Facebook and Instagram to be a place to communicate with their consumers. But now as the algorithm starts to change for all these social media platforms, whenever they wanna talk to their fan clubs…they have to pay a lot of money…with Konvy being the leading platform in Thailand for this purpose already, we can solve this problem for them.’

Paulo: And is that Brand Voice limited to the Konvy platform itself or do you also cater to other channels that they could customize?

Gui: So right now we have built Brand Voice into our platform, because we still want to drive traffic to our platform, and this is a destination that is trying to solve all the needs of beauty customers. But we are also expanding this brand voice to multiple partners that we’re working with as well. So in the past, there were a lot of magazines. There were a lot of beauty channels, but now they’re gone, but they helped brands to be in the market. So Konvy is expanding to collaborate with these kinds of partners, to see how can we solve these kinds of problems for the brands together.

“Right now we have built Brand Voice into our platform, because we still want to drive traffic to our platform, and this is a destination that is trying to solve all the needs of beauty customers. But we are also expanding this brand voice to multiple partners that we’re working with as well.”

Paulo: One thing that I really like about your approach is you really talk to the brands, even one on one, really building relationships with them, even on a personal learning level, even for you. And I’m sure you already have been doing that even 10 years ago. but obviously what the brands need will differ depending on the type of brand. It’s not as simple as all these brands have the same pain point. The first question is what are the differences between the pain points of global versus local brands, and how do you prioritize the offerings based on that?

Gui: The Thai market is about four to five billion US dollars — that’s the market size for beauty. And there are so many brands. Yes, there’s an incremental market size every year, but us as one company, while we do want to help every brand, but our capability is limited. So there are a handful of brands that we can help with, but we’re trying our best to help lot of them.

And as you mentioned, brands are in different stages of their life cycle. There are brands that we’re working with that could be big brands like L’Oreal, and there are also brands that could be a very indie brand and just started by influencers in Thailand. And there could be brands that are coming from Turkey, for example.

And they’re very new. The owner might be Turkish and they happen to live in Thailand and they just brought a brand that they really love from Turkey to Thailand and they have no idea how to market this product. And they come to us, with our team having a very strong merchandising team and a very strong marketing solution teams and also myself, right?

I’m up in the front line to talk to the brands to filter brands or talk to brands that are suitable to become our customer. For example, there are some brands, let’s say the one that I mentioned is a Turkish brand, if their need is to be able to find a group of audience that might possibly like their brands.

So I communicate with the owner, and I ask them, what’s the income structure that you have in your mind? The people that going to like your brand, are they foreigners or are they Thai? Are they in Bangkok? Are they in Chiang Mai? What kind of age group are they?

Based on our very initial understanding of the brands, we can create campaigns to trial with our customers. And Konvy has a very deep database, and we’re heavily investing in data mining, understanding our customer behaviors and customer segmentations. 

So we’ll try with one segment first, with the segment that we imagine to be the most successful, and see if it comes back well. And if it is not well, we give feedback to the brand, “What we imagine is that the customer group that you are interested is age of 15 to 25, but actually from our database we see that a huge 24 to 35 is a group that is most interested with your brand. In what we see, they’re interested. So there’s huge traffic coming into your brand, but they still do not purchase.”

What we need to do now is to convert them into customers, either, let’s say by creating some influential content from local influencers or coming from the brand side, we can start to create some contents to educate the customer about what the brand is. We are building the funnel downcoming from brand awareness, from the consideration stage and later on helping the brands to convert.

“The Thai market is about four to five billion US dollars — that’s the market size for beauty. And there are so many brands…while we do want to help every brand, but our capability is limited…Based on our very initial understanding of the brands, we can create campaigns to trial with our customers. And Konvy has a very deep database, and we’re heavily investing into data mining, understanding our customer behaviors and customer segmentations.”

Enabling Beauty Brands to Expand, from Thailand to the Rest of the World

Paulo: What I really like about what you mentioned is that it’s not just the one direction, like the brand tells you, “Here’s what I want,” and then Konvy is like, “Okay, we’ll do what you want.” You guys are also like telling them, “Here’s what you’re learning in the market. Maybe it might be better to pivot this way, unlock this new market, et cetera, et cetera,” based on, as you mentioned, the amount of data that you’ve amassed over the years. 

One thing I am curious about is you’ve certainly painted this picture of Thailand being a leading market. You mentioned the four to five billion US dollar market growing every year, and it’s definitely more sizeable than the most of its neighbors in terms of the beauty market. So how would you say are global brands now looking at Thailand in terms of — are they seeing it as a gateway into the rest of Southeast Asia? Are they seeing it as a test bed for — if it succeeds in Thailand, maybe it’ll succeed everywhere else? How are these big brands seeing Thailand as a market?

Gui: Whenever a brand comes to Southeast Asia, big brands, they will put Thailand as the first place that they should conquer, and the reason why is not the population, but the well-established beauty markets, giving them that and a lot of all the neighboring countries are looking into Thailand as well, because Thailand is leading the whole trend for beauty throughout the region. 

Because of that big brands would want to make their success in Thailand first, but because of this, all the big brands are coming in as well as local brands, Chinese brands, Korean brands, European brands, everyone is competing. And that creates value for us. 

Whenever there’s huge competition going on in the market, a company like us as an intermediary or a platform that tries to connect both customers and brands by providing more efficient ways, more cost-efficient ways to connect these two people become a very valuable thing to have, because you cannot try to be like just one player and eat the whole market. So you need to find the right place to do the right things. 

So there’s a lot of technology that needs to be involved. That’s why if you see like all the big tech companies now, like Facebook and Google, they’re finding their own ways to being more cost-efficient. And Konvy is also the same thing, right? It’s just that we are approaching helping brands and consumers in a different way.

“Whenever a brand comes to Southeast Asia, big brands, they will put Thailand as the first place that they should conquer, and the reason why is not the population, but the well-established beauty markets…Whenever there’s huge competition going on in the market, a company like us as an intermediary or a platform that tries to connect both customers and brands by providing more efficient ways, more cost-efficient ways to connect these two people become a very valuable thing to have.”

Paulo: A follow-up to that is because of the position of Thailand, and just the influx of the supply side of the equation. And one of the reasons why Konvy has partnered with investors like Insignia Ventures is obviously the push towards international expansion. So how does coming from Thailand help Konvy be in the best position possible to be able to cater to more markets? Say for example that Turkish brand example that you mentioned, if they say, “I want to expand to the Philippines or expand to Indonesia, how does being in Thailand help Konvy be able to do that for those kinds of customers?”

Gui: A lot of investors asked me about our regional plan, and I didn’t come up with this plan just out of my own thoughts. And the reason why I have thought about regional expansion — and this regional expansion has to be supported by multiple pieces of evidence, and the first is that I’ve been talking to multiple brands, and brands coming to Thailand, and when they assess Southeast Asia, they realize it’s not one country. 

Even for myself having been in Thailand for more than 15 years now, I can’t say that I’m an expert or a super expert of Thailand. And if a foreign brand comes into Thailand, they also want to come into the Philippines and they want to come to Indonesia. It will take them a handful of years to be able to really understand what these markets are about. 

But the brands that we’re working with right now, let’s say Korean brands or Japanese brands or Chinese brands, once they work with us and they have really liked working with us, they share their thoughts that they also want to expand to other countries, and they ask if we can be their partner to expand to those countries because they don’t have the capability to and they don’t have the knowledge to, and in Thailand right now, they are successful, but they want to grow to other countries, and ask if Konvy can be the platform or can Konvy be the one that is going to help them do this.

That’s how we found the value and market need for regional expansion. And thanks to Insignia for coming in, as this will help us expand. We are lucky to have a regional investor, because our vision for the business is growing beyond the borders of Thailand, hopefully into Southeast Asia and maybe even beyond Southeast Asia, because there are a lot of Thai brands that want to go to American markets and European markets. So that’s what we’re hoping for.

“…the brands that we’re working with right now, let’s say Korean brands or Japanese brands or Chinese brands, once they work with us and they have really liked working with us, they share their thoughts that they also want to expand to other countries, and they ask if we can be their partner to expand to those countries because they don’t have the capability to and they don’t have the knowledge to…That’s how we found the value and market need for regional expansion.”

Unlocking Omnichannel and its Ties to Cost-Efficiency

Paulo: Another aspect to — there’s the international aspect of Konvy’s growth, then there’s also the omnichannel aspect, which we touched on a little bit earlier. So I just wanted to expand a little bit on that. What does omnichannel mean for Konvy? And it’s certainly a trend that Insignia has seen over the past few years that it’s not just about building a single online platform, just one website, and distributing everything through that. You want to consider many other different channels. So what does omnichannel mean for Konvy?

Gui: I’ve been thinking about this question for the last 10 years, right? And I was fortunate that I made right decision. And in the past when investors talked to me asking, are we just gonna stay as a single platform? Is the business trying to build a platform that’s the largest in Thailand or maybe possibly the largest beauty platform in the world?

And I thought about this over and over again, right? I start to realize, right, even platforms like Facebook, even though they are social media platform, there are times that it ends up that people are moving away from Facebook and they’re moving to Instagram and Instagram being the most popular, and over the last few years they are being taken over by TikTok in just the last one to two years, and have realized that even such big platforms like this that are the number one in the world could eventually be taken over.

And this question comes to my mind is Konvy going be in the same situation? So I questioned myself, and I came to the realization that the value of Konvy is not that we are the most valuable or most biggest platform to be in the market, but the things that we are doing for the consumers and for the brands, that is what our value lies on. And behaviors change, like they like to buy in 7/11 in one day, but tomorrow they like to buy in shopping mall, then people like to buy in shopping malls today, but they might like to buy on ecommerce platforms tomorrow. 

And things keep changing, and Konvy has to be in the position where we have to foresee the behavior of consumers and adapt ourselves and be there for the next generations. That’s how I see ourselves.

And the word omnichannel means that Konvy doesn’t have to be just on one platform. Konvy has to innovate to be a platform that the future is going to be. That’s why I’m also trying to foresee, other than social commerce, other than even TikTok that is rising, where is the next platform going to be? And we have to prepare, because for a lot of these kinds of platforms, you want to get in early. 

It is similar to 10 years ago, when there was no e-commerce. I have to try to foresee, and now people are talking about the metaverse and then I have to see if the metaverse is going to be the next big thing for the ecommerce market too. So that actually drives my interest to always be innovating this company as well.

“I came to the realization that the value of Konvy is not that we are the most valuable or most biggest platform to be in the market, but the things that we are doing for the consumers and for the brands, that is what our value lies on…Konvy has to be in the position that we have to foresee the behavior of consumers and adapt ourselve and be there for the next generations. And the word omnichannel means that Konvy doesn’t have to be just one platform. Konvy has to innovate to be the platform that the future is going to be.”

Paulo: That’s really a great mindset to have. And really the biggest asset of Konvy is not the platform itself but really the foresight, as you mentioned, whether it’s driven by data, or the relationships that you have with the brands or the Thai consumers who are, as you said, really leading the market forward in the region. 

I wanted to tie that concept to another idea that maybe you might think of differently only having been a venture backed startup only recently. For the past 10 years, you’ve largely been bootstrapped only until recently that you start to raise funding for Konvy. How do you think about cost efficiency, especially in this market, thinking about scale and growth in a cost efficient way, especially given that you talked about that mindset earlier about always innovating, “always thinking about day one” kind of mindset. So how does that tie into being a cost-efficient company?

Gui: As you mentioned earlier, this is my fourth venture from my childhood. And my parents always taught me to be — they did not ask me to try to be a successful person, but they taught me to be a responsible person. So even the last few ventures, I ventured with money from my own money and money that we borrowed from friends and all the money that we borrowed from friends, we may have lost it, but we have to find a way to pay back.

I never take money and just spend it. That was never in my mindset. And for Konvy, I did not want to build a business that relies on venture funding. And I believe that if the business has its own value, it should be able to not just survive by its own, it should be able to grow by itself. Investments coming from ventures or from partners could be accelerators for growth. But it does not gives you answers for questions that you do not understand. 

So I mentioned that not trying to burn the money that the investor give in has been in my initial thoughts since the very beginning, and now over the last few year, I have had a much clearer picture of what I want to build this business to be. And because of this, I started to seek for investors now. I want to take the money when the business is ready and now is the time, and that’s why we did it just recently.

“And for Konvy, I did not want to build a business that relies on venture funding. And I believe that if the business has its own value, it should be able to not just survive by its own, it should be able to grow by itself. Investments coming from ventures or from partners could be accelerators for growth. But it does not gives you answers for questions that you do not understand.”

What Adaptability Means for a Leader

Paulo: I wanted to shift gears a little bit and go into your sort of leadership. One thing I was curious about is how your role as CEO has evolved over the years. What are things that you’ve had to learn as a leader, as a CEO, managing an organization that has a different culture from your own background. What are your biggest learnings from that?

Gui: I want to tell a small story to explain that. In the very beginning, when I came to Thailand, I couldn’t speak Thai. And Thailand is, very different from Singapore or Philippines or Malaysia, where a huge population of the people in these countries do speak English. So I was trying to hire people that speak English.

It was really difficult. And I’m trying to host meetings in English, but a lot of the brand owners do not even speak English, and even for brands that are big, their business heads couldn’t speak English too. And I was thinking that literally, my new year resolution is that the biggest challenge for me to grow this business is me having an effective way to communicate with my staff and the brands. 

I just put this as my biggest goal for myself, because I think that it is directly linked with the business, even though its also to my personal benefit, but linked with the business directly and being able to do so, I was being able to start communicating with staff that have been working with me for four to five years. I never got a chance to really communicate with them. 

In the past, I’m just saying hi and bye, but because of that, my position evolved from a person that just started the idea, but later on, being able to communicate, and understand a culture to make the business successful in the country. 

Sometimes it’s not about you trying to change the world, but for yourself, you have to start understanding the market that you’re running in into first, and adapting yourself. Some of my staff used to mention, “Gui, you come back every year different.” There’s one period every year that I’m just gone, at least 10 to 20 days, and people don’t know where I am. And I’m just taking that time to myself to finalize what should be my next year’s focus and I come back very differently, with a very different mindset. 

Whenever I come back, I host a meeting with all the management levels and I share with them that this year we’re gonna be this and I’m gonna be very different. Please expect that there will be some difference in my way of managing. I might be able to sit with you to discuss your family problems in the past, but now the business is a couple of hundred people. Now my time for you might be very limited. We used to have five heads. Now we have 30 heads, even if I give each of you 15 minutes per week, that would mean a few days is gone. So I have to rearrange my time to focus on where I should be. So I’m evolving and my leadership and my management style have to change as well to adapt to how the business is.

“Sometimes it’s not about you trying to change the world, but for yourself, you have to start understanding the market that you’re running in into first, and adapting yourself.”

Paulo: I’m sure a lot of learnings for our listeners, especially those who are operating in markets that they didn’t necessarily come from. And speaking to that, is there anything in particular that you learned about Thailand or Thai culture or about workplace culture or culture in terms when it comes to growing a company there?

Gui: As you know, I’m a Chinese national, so the culture how we work in China was born into my blood, right? So working hard was the number one Chinese trait to have. Our parents, apart from telling me to be responsible, they told me that you need to work hard. Without working hard, you are not going to achieve what you want in your life. 

So working seven days a week is a norm for me. The 996 sometimes is not 996, maybe a lot more like 9-11-7. And as you know, the pace of ecommerce is really fast we still had to work after midnight all the time in the very first few years. I had huge trouble working this with my staff and every time we ran over double-digit promotions, there was a huge turnover. There’s a huge turnover. 

And I try to understand, one of the questions that I ask my staff when I interview them is that, “Why do you work?” I ask them these questions. They say they want to find a place that can give them a happy environment. It seems that happiness is why they work and this is kind of different from what I want. You see, in my own viewpoint, the time to work is just trying to accomplish what we want to do. It’s not for happiness.

And I like to throw a slogan to them that, if you wanna give happiness, then I’d rather just go sell ice creams. Because of that and understanding that most of the population in Thailand they really look into a work-life balance kind of work style, I have to accept it. And even being in a fast-moving industry, we have to take into account that that culture is much, much more laidback than what China is doing or than Silicon Valley is doing. 

What you want might not necessarily be what they want, and you have to find a balance in this. You want to win this market and you have to take their culture into consideration and slow down sometimes. So we have trip every year, and we need to respect that there are so many holidays in Thailand. I cannot just say if there’s a holiday that I just want to work. I cannot do that. 

So it’s about finding a balance or in some way we invest heavily into technology, as another way to complement this situation. Let’s say everyone is going to holiday but who answers the customer service? And people in here, sometimes you’re paying them triple or quadruple and they don’t even want to work. So now you need to start thinking about what about bots. What about other alternatives? What about having a remote work environment for customer service? And that’s what I learned about this culture.

“…and understanding that most of the population in Thailand they really look into a work-life balance kind of work style, I have to accept it…So it’s about finding a balance or in some way we invest heavily into technology…”

Rapid Fire Round

Top 3 traits of a great CEO?

Gui: Number one is being humble. Number two is continuing to learn. Number three is being open minded.

What innovation in Southeast Asia ecommerce are you most excited about?

Gui: So the crypto market was very active in Thailand as well as around the world in the last two years and for myself, I actually looked into this market quite a bit, either personally investing or even understanding how crypto mining works, as well as Web 3.0.

I want to understand because Konvy is the leading beauty platform not just in Thailand. There are not many beauty vertical platforms around the world. We are one of them, and I will believe that we are one of the oldest to be in the market. And there’s a lot of innovation that we brought into the market and a lot of people around the world kind of copy us, and the next thing that I want to foresee is how Web 3.0 or how the metaverse, and how the crypto can come into the beauty world and how can we take that and integrate it to our consumer shopping experience.

So we’re working with some big tech companies and we’re launching AR experiences to our customers, trial running those as well, and to see how is that feedback. And in Thailand, there are not many technology companies that can do this. So most of the big players coming to Thailand will seek Konvy as their partner to do this, and then I always say yes. There are some other meetings when I always say no. But for innovation and collaboration, I always want to explore.

What is your skincare routine?

Gui: Over the last few years, I start to understand ingredients, products, and why ingredients or how skincare could affect our skin. Before we always think that skincare is just, another trick that the market builds, similar to other industries. For example, milk is always better for you. But after you really understand about it, all those celebrities stay fit and their face stays so young for a reason. 

For the first thing that I would want to put on my face every day, starting from the basic, would be an effective sunscreen. A mix of physical and chemical sunscreen would be good for myself as well. For the night, I usually like to put toners and serums as the most basic. Even for hair care now I start to look into products that are more, either vegan or more organic because, having too many chemicals in the shampoo, may damage your hair or the roots of your hair in the long run, things like silicons and those, even though it makes it shiny and it makes it vibrant, that comes with negative effect as well. 

And apart from that, I do from time to time depending on my skin needs — if it’s too dried, then I apply oil on my skin. And if there’s an interview or if there are events, I do have to put my CC cream or BB cream to look nicer on my skin and sometimes maybe some lip balm to keep my lips and more moist. So very basic, but I think every guy should at least cover what I do on a daily basis.

Favorite travel destination in Southeast Asia? 

Gui: I definitely love Thailand. I think Thailand because the food is really nice. We have very diversified food in here. For me as a Chinese, I would love to have some Chinese food, time to time, and Thai food is really nice. It’s not oily, and we can get a easy access to international foods as well.

But apart from Thailand, I recently traveled to Singapore a lot. And I really like the environment apart from the part that is being very expensive, but the environment is really nice. The air is really nice and it’s easy to get around, Uber and applications and technologies are widely used throughout the city.

So I definitely would want to have a place of my own in Singapore. And we have to start thinking about education for our next generation. So that’s definitely a place that we would consider.

How do you de-stress / take care of your mental health?

Gui: I would not recommend my child, if I get a chance to, to do startups, because it’s such a tiring journey. And myself, I mentioned I started by being a small salesman. Even I was in school, I love enjoying business already, being a direct sales kind of persons when I was 12.

And until now it’s been like more than 23 years of me in the business world; it’s because I really love what I’m doing. That’s why I’m not as tired. But if you are not really in love in what you are doing, business or startups or being an entrepreneur, it could be extremely exhausting for you. But I love looking at computers, either I’m coding or I’m watching some clips from some of the new influencer in the market. I love what I’m doing already, so it’s less of burnout for myself. But I get to the point that you spend so much time into working. You literally have no personal life in some years.

When you’re eating, you’re thinking about work. You’re talking about work constantly. I don’t even own a car in Thailand, so I’m constantly working. I’m on the bus, I’m working. While I’m swimming, I’m thinking about work. I’m showering, I’m thinking about work.

But I came to a point that your body starts to age and it’s not like when you’re 22 you can stay up all night and don’t have to sleep. But now it starts when you sleep at 3:00 AM now your body starts to feel like, you’re tired. So the last three years I started to pick up habits that I never thought I would be doing, but I now start to find balance in my life. 

It’s not saying that trying to speed up in your life is bad, but life is always about finding balance, right? You’re not trying to be the fastest. There’s no such thing as you’re the fastest. There’s always a comparative. So in life, you have to start looking at a balance. So habits that I like to pick up now — number one, I like to swim. I like to swim a few times a week So that is one thing. Another is I started to practice calligraphy. I hate writing things in the past because everything is just on computers. But now I started to practice calligraphy. I have bad handwriting, but I started to practice calligraphy.

Number three, I finally got myself into meditation. These three things are my new habits now, whenever I have some extra time and whenever I think about giving myself some time for my own health. For entrepreneurs, just newly into this new startup business, one day you will need to ask yourself, and you will face this problem, and you need to get into it earlier than later. 

And we still have another 40 years to go. So let’s get it long. Imagine, right, that the company is already 10 years old. And most people are already down after three to four years. And for ourselves, us having the stamina to be able to keep up last 10 years already wins 90% of the competitors. So that is extremely important to have.