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The death of my brand - Indochine Natural
…. In the early 2000’s my wife and I co-founded Indochine Natural while living in Viet Nam. I’m a qualified chemist, knew what I was doing, and took risks formulating and going in directions that no other brands were venturing at that time.
Business took off, and in a very short time, I had opened a GMP-certified production facility and was exporting globally. Then we relocated to Penang, Malaysia, where I opened another greatly expanded production facility to meet our export demands. At that stage, I was formulating and manufacturing soap bars, liquid soap, and various face/body oils.
With Indochine Natural, I also got involved with assisting those in poverty. This was as a result of my 30+ years working globally as a freelance consultant in the development sector for the World Bank, European Commission, Asian Development Bank, etc.
In a fairly short time, 90% of our turnover was coming from Private Label work for various brands globally.
In 2022, I took on an American investor, but things went downhill rapidly. This American, who was in charge of our marketing, started to make very bad decisions, and profitability plummeted.
There was no recovery, so after the American investor had departed, I had no choice but to liquidate all of our equipment to pay debts. And our hard-working, dedicated staff had no jobs.
Once the business side of things had been cleared and all debtors paid, we departed Malaysia in 2024. And that was the end of Indochine Natural.
Some very hard and painful lessons learnt. But a great experience.
I welcome questions via email: mikethair@gmail.com
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This discussion was modified 6 hours, 31 minutes ago by
mikethair.
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This discussion was modified 6 hours, 31 minutes ago by
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3 Replies
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If anyone is looking for help in establishing a skincare brand, I’m available.
you can email me at: mikethair@gmail.com
Kind regards,
Dr Mike Thair
Consultant: Skincare Product Development and Manufacturing.
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What were the lessons you learned (besides don’t hire someone who will drive your business out of business)?
What kind of bad marketing decisions did they make?
Presumably, they thought they were making good decisions.
Did you have the power to approve what they were doing with your brand?
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Mike. Sorry it ended but quite a accomplishment and experience.
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