Granola love
Partners Chanisara Thothong and Wuthikarn Wongdeeprasith stayed the course on their road to success
Chanisara Thothong cannot force herself to watch video testimonies in which people praise Diamond Grains, the no-dairy, no-wheat granola brand she founded with boyfriend Wuthikarn Wongdeeprasith three years ago.
“I have to skip it,” Chanisara said. “Compliments make me feel shy.”
A sense of failure, however, is something she cannot avoid after becoming an entrepreneur. It also gave her a taste she will never forget. “It is not delicious,” Chanisara, who comes across as lively and articulate through the hour-long conversation, falls silent briefly. “It really is not okay.”
Chanisara and Wuthikarn, both 27, have come a long way from low moments experienced in an initial business start-up, when nobody wanted to buy their goods, let alone offer feedback.
From a niche, mail-order-only product, Diamond Grains is now available at most leading supermarkets and food stores around the country.
From initially selling 10 boxes, the young couple has shipped millions and received more than 10,000 responses from their customers together with recognition as a rising-star business venture.
Chanisara and Wuthikarn are co-CEOs and have learnt about coping with business highs and lows, as well as ever-evolving problems while developing insights into their relationship.
“People who look at us from the outside may think we have found success,” Chanisara said. “Our products are in the mall. We are on TV being interviewed about the business. Our sales volume is at a satisfying level,” added Chanisara, who graduated from Chulalongkorn University’s Mass Communications Faculty with honours.
But since Chanisara does not measure success in terms of sales volume or income generated, accomplishment can be elusive to her.
“There was one moment though, when I started to believe that I could define success,” Chanisara recalled. “It was early in our venture. I received a comment from a customer who said our granola has made her life better.”
From that moment on, she has made it the objective of her business not just to sell products but to meet people’s needs, serving them and improving their quality of life.
Chanisara said when she looks at what she is doing in this manner, opportunities are endless.
While the couple always knew they wanted to work with grains as the main ingredients for their products, they didn’t find any successful recipes at first. The duo experimented with cereal bars, cookies and a few other goodies but none of them were marketable.
“We made unsuccessful attempts with four or five products. That is quite a lot for a new venture. It took us three years before we came up with the granola,” said Chanisara, who developed the recipes herself.
The two CEOs handled everything by themselves. Chanisara baked the granola and designed promotional materials and packaging. Wuthikarn helped with the production and delivery.
The two founders, who now employ staff to do those jobs, still divide their jobs between product development and marketing, and budgeting and financing.
From a company of two, Diamond Grains now employs more than 80 people, who work at its manufacturing plant and in administrative units.
Chanisara said when the first purchasing order came in after she started marketing the ready-to-eat granola in 2014, she was overjoyed.
“I was so desperate to find a customer,” Chanisara said, adding that her profound appreciation for buyers remains until today. “After three years of receiving absolutely no market response, we finally caught a break. Somebody actually bought our product.”
The couple didn’t have much time to savour the feeling, however. Through word of mouth and direct, online interaction with their customers, Diamond Grains quickly became a popular choice among the health conscious. From selling a dozen cups, purchasing orders flooded in to the point that Chanisara and Wuthikarn didn’t even have time to sleep.
Before long, the self-confessed workaholic Chanisara fell ill. “I didn’t always know what I was doing,” Chanisara said. “The three years of failure probably added pressure without my knowledge. I thought I was having fun and couldn’t stop. Looking back, I think I was using the work to prove myself, to prove my self-worth and to show people who doubted me that I could do it.”
Chanisara said she would go without proper sleep for four or five days in a row. “I didn’t know I was hurting myself.”
Chanisara admitted she was lucky to have Wuthikarn by her side, who could pull her back when she went overboard.
Though Wuthikarn knew Chanisara did not stop until she achieved perfection, he admitted it was still shocking to experience it first-hand.
“At one point, I wondered whether it was a good idea setting up the company,” Wuthikarn said. “She does not always know her own limits.”
We made unsuccessful attempts with four or five products. That is quite a lot for a new venture. It took us three years before we came up with the granola
Wuthikarn said the only thing he could do was to keep a watchful eye on his business partner and girlfriend, and sound a warning when he thought she was doing too much.
“If a reminder does not work there will be a stern warning and a serious sit-down-and-talk session,” said the business administration graduate. “I would say, if she is going to be like this, maybe we didn’t have to do this. Maybe it would be better to go back to the time when we had nothing.”
He added that if all the talks failed to stop his girlfriend from overworking, he would let her go.
“If she ended up in a hospital, I only had to take care of her then,” Wuthikarn said. He quickly added that his girlfriend has become much better at maintaining a work-life balance. She started to build a team and trusted people enough to let them help her.
Chanisara said Wuthikarn’s support and constant companionship through thick and thin has taught her a new meaning of love.
“For some people, love is about romantic moments or nice meals. For me, love is about being with someone during good and bad times. It’s about learning to sacrifice yourself and to forgive,” Chanisara said.
“He is a shoulder for me to cry on. He is the only person who makes me want to become stronger and to strive to be better at everything.”
Both of them also see problems as being an integral part of doing business. For them, problems are there to be solved and failures are what they can learn from.
“We never know when we will come across the right thing,” Chanisara said. “Some people may be lucky and hit the jackpot at the very first try. We probably had to make some 50 or 100 attempts before we caught a break. But if we had stopped at the 49th or 99th try, wouldn’t we regret it later?”