She priced a Thai perfume like Chanel & built a ฿500M brand.

Founded: 2017 · Industry: Fragrance & beauty · Funding: Bootstrapped · Started: From an ad agency job, with ฿5 million of her own and her partners’ money

Chiang Mai, 2017.

A new perfume shop opens at One Nimman. The bottles cost about the same as the counter brands in the big malls, which for a Thai label is unheard of.

A customer picks one up, checks the price, and says it out loud: "You're brave, pricing it as high as a counter brand."

The founder is standing right there. She hears every word. And she doesn't change the price.

Tananya Suteerachai, Fah to everyone who knows her, cared about the environment from when she was a child. So she did what made sense on paper: a journalism degree at Thammasat University, then a master's in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management in the United States.

She came back to Thailand more than ten years ago and found almost no jobs in that field.

So she went back to the other thing she'd always loved. "I went back to what I liked from the very start, media and advertising," she said. Two-plus years in an ad agency taught her branding, product design and how to tell a story that sells. That job is where she learnt the craft JOURNAL runs on.

There's one more piece. As an exchange student in Japan, she interned at a skincare shop and learnt how to look after customers politely and humbly. That lesson shows up in every JOURNAL store today.

Her family business was real estate and steel. Big projects. Her father had even taken a steel company public.

Fah and her husband couldn’t find a souvenir for their friends that told the story of their homeland. They originally co-founded the brand together as a husband-and-wife entrepreneurial team after returning to Thailand New York City. They kept trying to show foreign friends what was special about Thailand, and kept running into the same wall. Thai souvenirs felt generic and nothing told a real story.

Back home, her husband opened a design agency to help small Thai brands look as good as their products actually were. Through that work they met a perfumer whose quality stopped them. JOURNAL launched in 2017 with three partners, Fah among them, all believing Thai products deserved to be taken seriously abroad.

They put in ฿5 million. ฿2 million went on shop rent and the rest on raw materials.

Her father didn't get it. "My dad was used to big projects. When I told him I was going to sell perfume one bottle at a time, he didn't understand at all. He said, 'What are you doing?'"

She did it anyway, without expecting much. For her it was about fun and happiness.

Personal Take: We think the thing from our country has to be cheap to sell. Maybe our town isn't known for anything. But Thailand wasn't known for perfume either.

Bangkok rent would have bought them a tiny shop. In Chiang Mai, the same money got a big, beautiful store at One Nimman where customers could actually experience the brand. Big malls in Bangkok were close to impossible for a new brand anyway, except through short pop-ups.

None of the three founders had run a retail business. There was no budget to hire experts, so everything was trial and error. "Lots of things we thought would work failed. But those lessons taught us to adapt the next time."

Then the price problem. In 2017, almost no Thai brand dared charge more than ฿1,000 a bottle. "Back then nobody believed anyone would buy. But we did it because we believed in the quality and what we'd put into it." Her costs really were high: natural ingredients, quality essential oils, scents extracted the traditional way over three to six months, and agarwood in every perfume.

People tried them. People came back.

Tourists were the first market, especially Chinese visitors, who posted reviews online and spread the word with zero ad budget.

2018 looked good. Then COVID shut the borders and sales at the tourist-heavy stores, One Nimman and Maya, dropped to almost nothing.

Luckily, JOURNAL had just started making body oil. Fah's thinking was that Thai customers might be shy about an expensive local perfume, but a body oil is an easier first try. "Body oil isn't as much about scent as perfume, so Thai people dared to try it. Once they liked it, they came back for the perfume."

So they moved online. Then Thai actress Gypsy Keerati Mahapruekpong tried the oil, liked it, and reviewed it. It went viral.

COVID changed how they worked too. Freelancers gave inconsistent results, so they built an in-house content team. "Good content matters as much as the product and the concept," she said.

Most perfume brands chase global trends. Fah looked at Thai life instead.

One Halloween, the team wanted a scent inspired by Thai ghosts. The result was Mae Nak, after the famous ghost story. For Thais, Mae Nak is also about love that won't die. So rose opens the scent for romance, then lime, for the scene where Mae Nak stretches her arm out of the house to pick one.

Then came Nang Ram for Thai dancers, Mango Sticky Rice, Songkran, Kumarn the child ghost, a Pride scent, and a nightlife collection named after Thonglor, Silom, Khao San and Nimman.

Not everyone gets it. "Some people don't understand, but some just hear the name and want it right away," she said. That's the marketing plan, really. The name starts the conversation.

Here's what the numbers did. Revenue went from ฿26 million in 2021 to ฿66 million in 2022, then ฿169 million in 2023 and ฿300 million in 2024. That's over 100% growth two years in a row. By 2025, reports put it around half a billion baht.

How? More stores and a steady online push. Chiang Mai first, then Bangkok department stores, Pattaya and onward. By May 2026 JOURNAL had 23 branches plus distribution in more than 40 multi-brand beauty stores across Thailand, and a team of around 170.

And the store experience comes straight from that Japanese skincare shop. Staff tell the story behind each scent and let customers try, with no hard selling. "We don't push the product. We want customers to love the brand first," she said. Most of them come back.

She's also a mother of three. Her TikTok bio says it right next to CEO.

JOURNAL is aiming for an IPO within five years. Her father, the one who asked "what are you doing?", has taken a company public before, and now he's the one encouraging her.

Next markets are Asia, the UAE and Europe. She wants beautiful JOURNAL shops in Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong.

So what's the moat? Partly it's the culture, because nobody else can bottle Mae Nak and make it feel this Thai. Partly it's the price ceiling she broke on purpose, and the body oil that let Thai customers in through a cheaper door. And mostly it's a journalist's instinct that every product needs a story before it needs an ad.

She started with ฿5 million and a father who didn't understand. Customers called her brave for her prices, and three years in, a pandemic wiped out her main customers.

Researched with AI. Fact-checked by She Started Anyway.