“Growing globally, our outbound strategy is to bring our Thai products, our Filipino products, and our Malaysian products to the global market, because they do have good products as well. Konvy’s playbook is more of a matchmaking for good global brands and good global products, to fill the gap where e-commerce is now full of cheap, low-quality products. Konvy partners with quality brands that people are not sure of: brands they’ve never heard about, but that are genuinely good. It’s difficult to do, but it’s in our genes to conquer the difficult things.”

In this episode of On Call with Insignia Ventures, host Paulo Aquino sits down with QingGui Huang (Gui), CEO and co-founder of Konvy, for a wide-ranging conversation on what it means to build a health and beauty e-commerce platform for Southeast Asia in 2026. Now in its thirteenth year of operation and fresh off a Series B round backed by Cool Japan Fund, Konvy has grown from Thailand’s leading beauty e-retailer into a regional multi-channel platform with stores and operations across Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. The discussion explores how shifting consumer behavior, the rise of TikTok Shop, and the growing complexity of omni-channel commerce are reshaping the competitive landscape, while Konvy’s “matchmaking” thesis, connecting quality global brands with underserved regional consumers, is finding new relevance as both inbound and outbound brand flows mature across the region. Gui also shares his perspective on AI’s complementary role in e-commerce operations, the challenges of cross-border localization, and what a potential public market listing could mean for Konvy’s next chapter.

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction

2:00 – Konvy’s Background and the Evolving E-Commerce Landscape

5:00 – Konvy as Southeast Asia’s Beauty and Health Gateway

7:00 – Pain Points for D2C and E-Commerce Brands

9:00 – AI as a Complementary Force in E-Commerce

13:00 – The Cool Japan Fund Partnership and Inbound Brand Strategy

16:00 – Outbound Strategy: Taking Southeast Asian Brands Global

18:00 – Omni-Channel Strategy: Balancing Online and Offline

21:00 – Localizing for New Markets: Philippines and Malaysia

23:00 – Building Global Infrastructure and the Path to Public Markets

26:00 – Advice for Entrepreneurs and Founders

About Our Guest

QingGui Huang, known as Gui, is the CEO and co-founder of Konvy, Thailand’s leading health and beauty e-commerce platform. A US-educated Chinese entrepreneur who received his Bachelor’s in Management and International Business from Purdue University, Gui built online fashion businesses in Beijing before returning to Southeast Asia in 2011, spotting the opportunity to create a dedicated beauty e-commerce platform in Thailand. He founded Konvy in 2012 with his co-founders, growing it from a 100,000 baht startup in a single rented room into the country’s number one beauty retailer, carrying over 1,000 brands and 20,000 products across its own app, major marketplaces, TikTok Shop, and physical retail stores. Under his leadership, Konvy has expanded into the Philippines and Malaysia and raised multiple funding rounds, most recently a Series B led by Cool Japan Fund, reflecting the platform’s growing role as Southeast Asia’s gateway for global beauty brands, both inbound and outbound. Gui is a vocal advocate for the long-term potential of cross-border brand distribution, the complementary role of AI in e-commerce operations, and the value of building businesses that are genuinely difficult to replicate.

Transcript

Paulo J: We are back with a returning guest who, incidentally, has always come back to our show every two years since we first partnered in 2022.

It’s been a great partnership so far over the last four years. We’ve seen this company that had already established market leadership from the point of our partnership, but has since outgrown even that, expanding to new markets, expanding across multiple channels, and bringing new and exciting partners onto the platform as well.

I’m really excited to catch up with this returning guest and learn what they’ve been up to over the last two years. I have with me none other than Konvy CEO and co-founder QingGui Huang, or as I call him, Gui. Gui, thank you for joining us, two years later.

Gui: Thanks, Paulo, for inviting me. It’s been an honor to talk to you, and we’ve been doing a lot of PRs online together. Thanks very much.

Paulo J: Yeah, hopefully. We’ve always been doing these calls over Zoom. Hopefully next time we can actually do it in the Konvy office, or maybe in a Konvy store, and do it live as well. But in the meantime, this will suffice.

When we last spoke in 2024, we had just done a round (I think it was a Series A extension) and you had just opened your first physical store in Bangkok. You had also just explored TikTok Shop, and you were exploring the Philippines. Maybe you can catch our audience up: two years later, you recently raised a Series B. Congratulations on that, by the way. What has changed for Konvy in the last two years?

Konvy’s Background and the Evolving E-Commerce Landscape

Gui: Before answering your questions, I’d like to give the audience a little bit of background on what we do. Konvy is a leading platform focused on health and beauty categories. Our business has been operating for more than 13 years now.

As you mentioned, in the early years, we launched our offline stores. As a leading e-commerce beauty retailer, we don’t see ourselves as just an online business. We’re always thinking about how we can be more innovative, how we can adapt to consumer behavior, and how we can serve customers better. That’s why we’ve been exploring different kinds of channels. Two years ago, we were entering TikTok Shop, and we were doing offline as well. Now we’re stepping into the Philippines, as you mentioned. There’s a lot of new things going on.

But the last two years have seen a lot of things change. I think 2026 has seen the whole economy and the whole global market dramatically shift. A lot of businesses are transforming. If you asked me this question ten years ago, it would have been more about people just starting to know about e-commerce. Now it’s a messy situation. The geopolitical tensions going on and everything. People are very unsure about what’s going to happen, and brands are as well.

On the brand side, brands are not sure what’s going to happen. I’ve been talking to a lot of brands about how they can prepare for the next few years. Should they invest more online or more offline? Should they invest more in TikTok? TikTok came in just two years ago, but they already hold a significant share of the market. Over the last two or three years, things have changed dramatically, and brands haven’t been reacting fast enough. A lot of brands are losing their competitiveness because of how consumer behavior has shifted. Konvy’s role is to be the intermediary between consumers and brands, to help consumers find good products.

Konvy as Southeast Asia’s Beauty and Health Gateway

Paulo J: Yeah, I think that whole thesis, being a platform or a bridge between brands and consumers, has really paid off for Konvy over the last 13 years. It’s just that the form has changed over the years, right? Initially online, but now really omni-channel as well. Initially Thailand, but now multiple markets across Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and even Malaysia. This whole evolution of Konvy, from number one e-commerce retailer in Thailand to really becoming a Southeast Asia gateway for beauty and healthcare brands: how do you see Konvy living up to this new expectation and brand identity that you’re trying to build?

Gui: E-commerce is quite challenged. It was very challenging before, and until today it gets even more challenging to operate an e-commerce business. Having a store on a marketplace would be relatively simple, but launching a full e-commerce platform has a lot of entry barriers right now.

All the years that we have built our infrastructure, on the technology side, our supply chain, our relationships with brands, empowers us when looking at opportunities not just in Thailand. So we’ve studied all the countries around us: Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and more. And there’s no company quite like us in the region. The question was: why?

It’s because it’s really difficult for any company to launch a platform like ours. So we would like to take our platform and expand, not just regionally. We’re hoping it will go globally as well. Even though our immediate footsteps are focused on Southeast Asia, we do have the ambitions to take our platform to global markets.

Pain Points for D2C and E-Commerce Brands

Paulo J: Maybe you could dig a little bit deeper into that expertise around e-commerce. What are the specific pain points for businesses or brands that are looking to launch an e-commerce platform, and how do you guys address them, especially in 2026?

Gui: Launching a D2C e-commerce site is relatively difficult, especially from a few perspectives.

Number one: in Asia, it’s really hard to find software engineering talent. The number of talents in the market is really limited. The majority, after they graduate, either go into the banking sector or into the telecom sector. There aren’t many software engineers left to really start a tech company. That alone already determines a lot. Even if you have the passion, there just aren’t enough people in the market to fulfill that need.

Reason number two: in the early stage when we started e-commerce, the user acquisition cost was very low. We’re talking about a dollar per user. But nowadays, we’re looking at thirty dollars, thirty times the cost for acquiring one user compared to when we started. That’s a big challenge. The good thing is that Konvy has accumulated a huge number of fans and customers who have been staying with us for a long period of time. But if you just enter this market right now, you’re looking at thirty times the expense, which is really difficult.

Third: if you look at all the major tech companies around the world, they mainly come from either the US, China, or India, where they have huge populations. The reason is that the initial investment for tech is huge, and what matters is how many users you can eventually reach. If we invest millions of dollars into a tech platform but Thailand alone only has seventy million people, the return is naturally more constrained. If I had done this in China, I would have reached a billion users with the same investment. With this background, it makes building new e-commerce and tech companies really difficult in Southeast Asia.

AI as a Complementary Force in E-Commerce

Paulo J: You’re helping a lot of these D2C companies and D2C brands start more efficiently with your platform. But at the same time, as you’ve described, Konvy has also created a moat, having accumulated scale, working with multiple brands so unit economics make a lot more sense. You also have the supply chain and operational expertise to manage across multiple markets, and obviously the tech advantage as well.

I was curious about that first point, the lack of engineering talent. Some might argue that with AI, it’s now a lot easier to build online platforms. In our conversation two years ago, we also talked about AI a little bit and how you guys were adapting to it. How has your view on AI evolved in the last two years?

Gui: I think AI has brought a lot of opportunity, and at the same time, a lot of uncertainty. People are not sure how they should react to AI. My viewpoint is that there are a lot of things that cannot yet be replaced by AI. Let’s just look at our e-commerce business.

Having AI is definitely much, much easier on the development side of the website and the platform. But our business right now is operating at close to a thousand on-ground staff, and I would say ninety-five percent of them could not be replaced by AI. There’s a lot of communication between brands, understanding of market trends, supply chain management, product movement from one place to another, legals, importations, marketing. It’s a complex business model where AI can really come in handy to help accelerate certain tasks, but it just cannot change everything. It’s not possible to run a one-person e-commerce platform.

Yes, it’s much easier for someone to get started with AI, but once they really get the idea and the orders start coming in and they begin to scale, they need to think about people again. We do see AI as working with us in a complementary way. We have teams on the AI side investing time to build things that in the past would have been relatively difficult to integrate into our platform, and making it more interesting as a result.

Paulo J: For e-commerce, the user experience is probably the low-hanging fruit for AI. I know a lot of e-commerce players have been doing it even before the whole generative AI boom. And last time we talked about smarter recommendations and also how you use data from e-commerce transactions to inform how you design offline stores as well. Are there any new use cases on that front?

Gui: For sure, there’s a lot more. Our tech team is a hundred percent integrating AI tools, and I would say efficiency has increased at least fifty percent. In terms of usage, we’re integrating data analysis into all business units, so every team is leveraging it.

We have a lot of data, and in the past we had a huge data team with data people embedded in every functional team. Now, instead of having individual analysts on each team, every team member is equipped with data analysis skills. That’s making them much faster at making decisions. Presentations, all these kinds of things that used to take a lot of time are now being handled with AI.

We are not a design company. What we need is to really analyze data to understand customers and find the products they want. Our job is not to make PowerPoints extraordinarily creative. That’s something AI can reduce time on, so we can really focus on getting the right products to the right customers.

The Cool Japan Fund Investment and Inbound Brand Strategy

Paulo J: I mentioned earlier that AI can’t really replace a lot of the people in the organization, especially as it relates to the trust and relationships you build with brands across markets, with a lot of localization and tailoring to what specific brands need.

Speaking of catering to the needs of brands, I also wanted to talk about the recent round that you raised with Cool Japan Fund, which was really interesting given that they also invested in another Insignia portfolio company, also a consumer-facing business. I wanted you to share with the audience a little context on the value of having Cool Japan Fund as part of your partnership, and how you view Japanese brands in terms of trends and how they fit into Konvy’s global portfolio.

Gui: Japan has been the largest investor into Southeast Asia, I would say, for over the last thirty years. Japanese cars, Japanese culture: they have heavily influenced Southeast Asia. I’d say Thailand is probably the most Japan-influenced country in the region. You find Japanese food a lot more commonly than Chinese food in Thailand.

But over the last ten years, you don’t hear much about Japan anymore. With the Japanese economy getting more stable over the last two decades, they now want to come back and be more aggressive, investing into companies through collaborations and strategic investment.

We love the story that there are a lot of good Japanese products that very few people know about. This aligns with Konvy’s thesis: we want to bring good products to markets. So we’d love to explore products from Japan and bring them to global markets. With the full capability of Konvy, which can operate a brand end-to-end from scratch, investing in branding, marketing, and educating people about products, we have the end-to-end service. We would go into Japan, explore products not just on the health and beauty side but other categories as well, and bring them out.

Outbound Strategy: Taking Southeast Asian Brands Global

Paulo J: I think that’s really interesting and really taps into the playbook that Konvy already has, just expanding it a little bit further. What does global expansion mean for Konvy?

Gui: We have an inbound strategy and we have an outbound strategy.

Right now, we’ve always been playing the inbound side. Over the last ten years, Southeast Asia has really loved Korean products and Chinese products, driven by K-pop culture. We also foresee Japanese products and Japanese culture coming back, so we’ve been bringing a lot of brands inbound into Southeast Asia.

But over the last few years, we’ve seen a boom in local brands. Thai people are really creative, and the products reflect that. They fit a unique differentiation point in the market where they can hold their own against Korean or Chinese products and have the angles to reach their customers. They’re really strong in providing an emotional, highly creative experience. The packaging is really cute, and they understand Southeast Asian customers a little bit better. Product formulations probably fit the tropical market better as well.

So they do have their strengths. Growing globally, our outbound strategy is to bring our Thai products, our Filipino products, and our Malaysian products to the global market, because they do have good products as well. Konvy’s playbook is more of a matchmaking for good global brands and good global products, to fill the gap where e-commerce is now full of cheap, low-quality products.

Konvy partners with quality brands that people are not sure of: brands they’ve never heard about, but that are genuinely good. They have a good story they want to tell, but they don’t know what channel can tell it. And Konvy is going to close that gap for those brands.

Omni-Channel Strategy: Balancing Online and Offline

Paulo J: I think that’s an interesting way to put it, “matchmaking,” not just on a Thailand or Southeast Asia scale, but really on a global scale as well. We’ve definitely seen a lot of the inbound side already, and even more with this most recent round. But I think the outbound is going to be an exciting story to share, maybe in our next episode when there’s more to talk about.

I also wanted to touch on the omni-channel strategy. We’ve mentioned a lot of the different channels that you guys have built over the years. How do you see this evolving moving forward, in terms of the priority between online and offline and resource allocation?

Gui: If you look at China’s e-commerce market, especially on the health and beauty side, beauty is about seventy percent online in China. In Thailand right now, we’re close to thirty percent. The trend has been growing fast. But if you ask me where Southeast Asia will ultimately land, I’d think maybe forty to fifty percent online, which means fifty to sixty percent of sales will still be coming from offline.

And when you go to the Philippines, where the markets are dominated by offline channels, online is definitely a huge opportunity, but the whole infrastructure and logistics are complex. The Philippines is a combination of thousands of islands. Sometimes being able to receive something ordered online might take longer for the customer, so the experience might not be great.

You don’t want to just force people to buy online. That’s not the purpose of our business. The purpose of Konvy is to leverage e-commerce to bring convenience (that’s even where our name “Konvy” comes from). But if it’s inconvenient in some contexts, there’s no point forcing it. So we need to leverage an omni-channel strategy: what can we do well online, and what can we do well offline.

It’s not possible for us to sell a perfume to customers who have never smelled it. So when we’re bringing certain brands (let’s say we’re working with Coty Global right now, very closely, on bringing brands that are not yet penetrating markets like the Philippines), we’d like to bring them in, with Konvy as the value add. We help them enter those countries with not just an e-commerce capability, but by allowing the Philippine market to actually experience the products. They can try the perfume offline first. So you need both strategies to complement each other.

Localizing for New Markets: Philippines and Malaysia

Paulo J: Personally, I buy a lot of my skincare offline as well. I was really happy when Konvy launched their first Philippine store quite close to where I live. I was able to pay a visit and check out the product selection there. And I think for many consumers, especially first-time buyers who may not be as familiar with skincare and some of these products, it always helps to have a physical presence. That first experience can lead to becoming a regular purchaser and then maybe doing things online afterward.

So yeah, really interesting, and it helps with localization too. I think you worked with Robinsons to launch that first store. Maybe you can share a little bit about your thoughts on localization and how you’re really building these partnerships across markets.

Gui: The way we do business at Konvy, we like to work with partners. We focus on what we are good at, and for things that we’re not good at, we work with partners. We’re not trying to do everything ourselves.

Operating offline is not our strongest suit, I would say. Even though we have opened our offline stores, we are very strong at selecting and finding the products that the market needs, with data to back it up. But we are quite young as an offline retailer.

That’s why in all three countries where we’re operating, we’re trying to work with local businesses as our offline retail partners. Robinsons in the Philippines is one of the partners we’ve selected and worked together with very closely on how to curate assortments and bring more interesting global products into the Philippine market. They have been a great partner for us in expanding into the Philippines, providing a lot of support.

I would say entering another country is very difficult, much more difficult than I thought. Very different cultures. We cannot just take the Thai playbook, our standard operating procedures from Thailand, and use them in the Philippines. We tried it and it doesn’t work. We’re now creating a dedicated playbook specifically for the Philippines.

Building Global Infrastructure and the Path to Public Markets

Paulo J: How has expanding into the Philippines and now into Malaysia as well impacted the way that you look at Konvy’s future as a global platform, both for inbound and outbound brands?

Gui: I knew it was hard, because a lot of people fail doing this. I’ve talked to a lot of beauty brands that mentioned they’d like to grow to other countries. Even the ones that are very successful locally: I didn’t understand before why they wouldn’t be able to expand to other countries. And now I’m starting to understand why.

Because of that, it actually creates more opportunity for us. If we can really build this story successfully, the value that we can create as a company, for not just brands but for our investors, will be even more significant. Konvy has the capability to operate in multiple countries efficiently, and we can really create the kind of strategic positioning that helps brands circulate across markets. I think that’s a great opportunity, and I think we’ve made the right call. It’s difficult to do it, but it’s in our genes to conquer the difficult things.

Paulo J: The fact that it’s difficult gives you even more reason to actually do it, because if you succeed, you’ll be one of the few that can actually pull it off. On that point, you mentioned how this strategy can create a lot of value not only for the brands you work with, but also for your investors. Having run this company now for 13 years, one of the more memorable quotes from our first podcast was that even after several years in the business, it’s just the beginning. You really see yourself growing Konvy over the next two or three decades, even further down the line.

Have you thought about the public markets as well? What does that avenue mean for Konvy?

Gui: Raising a fund at this time is really challenging, not just in Southeast Asia but globally, because the global economy is very unstable. We do have investors throughout the last few years, having done a few rounds. So what does the public market really mean for us, and what does this Series B really mean for us in this market?

It really gives a lot of confidence to the market that good projects can still find investors, even though it’s difficult. Konvy has shown the Thai capital markets and the startup ecosystem that there are still people striving to succeed, no matter how difficult it is.

And going to the public markets is definitely one of our objectives, because we do have the ambitions to grow even more, and we’d like to share our business in the public markets and allow investors from global markets to enter our business and help it grow. It would be another channel of access to capital.

Paulo J: And it adds another dimension to Konvy being a global company down the line, not just in terms of the business itself but also in how it raises capital. So a lot of opportunities in that regard. It’s not going to be easy, but I think Konvy has proven time and again that you guys are really up for challenging tasks and objectives, and you still manage to make it work.

Advice for Entrepreneurs and Founders

Paulo J: On that note, final question for our audience: the founders, e-commerce founders, or D2C brand founders out there, any message for them in particular? Especially as you mentioned at the start of this conversation, 2026 is a really very different year, with a lot of things happening globally that are impacting supply chains and companies as well.

Gui: Sure. With AI coming into the market, I think it’s a great opportunity for anyone who would like to start their own business or startup again. I think it’s a great time. A startup is going to be a very long journey, but as a return, it’s an exciting one.

The last 13 years have been an extremely meaningful journey for me. I’ve learned a lot of things, going from someone who had never talked to a VC or done a podcast, to now sharing with new startup founders what to expect in this market.

This journey itself, there’s nothing to regret about. If you remember the first story I shared: I came back from the US and things were too easy. So if you ask me if I regret what I’ve done, not at all. I would encourage the younger generation, people who are thinking about doing startups: don’t give up. If you want to enter the market, if you want to make the world a better place, if you want to show people the value you can bring to this society, I think a startup is definitely the thing to do. Start from just yourself. It doesn’t matter. There will be people who will come. It’s hard to find money, but keep trying. They will see it.

And if you’ve done something related to health and beauty, you can come and find me. I’d love for the younger crowd to really find their ways of using AI, and figure out how we could do something together.

Paulo J: Yeah. If you’re building in healthcare and wellness, Gui is definitely the guy to talk to. Really excited to see how Konvy will evolve. Maybe in the next two years we’ll have another chat, hopefully sooner. Excited to see how the outbound strategy develops, and how that opens doors for a lot of our regional, local brands to grow globally. And also in terms of Konvy’s capital and fundraising journey, how that will take shape in the next few years.

And for myself as a Filipino here in the Philippines, hopefully more Konvy stores that we can go and visit.