Students Incorporated
Entrepreneurship
Khun Matum Left the Family Business to Prove He Earned It
Third-generation heir Khun Matum helped save his family's 60-year skincare company through COVID, then quit its salary to build a brand of his own.
Khun Matum spent five years helping keep his family's 60-year-old Thai skincare company alive through the pandemic that nearly ended it, then walked away from its payroll this past January to launch a second skincare brand with no salary at all. On this episode of Students Incorporated, the entrepreneur (who also runs an education consultancy in Melbourne and a heritage guesthouse business in Sukhothai) told co-hosts Esther and James why proving he'd earned his place mattered more than keeping a job that was already his by birth.
Cleaning Toilets and Modeling Ads to Pay Rent
Before any of that, there was Melbourne. Khun Matum studied sustainability management at Monash University, but the degree wasn't what shaped him: the rent was. His parents covered tuition and nothing else, a deliberate change from his time living in the UK, where full financial support had left him free to party. In Melbourne, he worked part-time at an Australian coffee franchise called Hudson Coffee, modeled in TVC ads promoting Australian tourism, and appeared in Melbourne Fashion Week. "I clean the toilet, fashion show, what else, TVC," he said. "So I did everything for a living just to pay rent and to support myself there."
That scramble carried into his job search. He applied to more than 100 places after graduating and got five interviews, landing a paralegal role at an immigration law firm despite never having completed a law degree, just a handful of law units that, as he put it, "doesn't count." He called himself "pretty much the slave of the lawyers," underpaid and overworked, but the job taught him Australian immigration law for free while he helped international students and immigrants navigate a path to a new life. "It feels like you're part of their journey to setting a new life in a new country," he said. "That's what I'm proud of."
An Inheritance That Almost Didn't Survive
His family has sold herbal powders and skincare products in Thailand for 60 years, dating back to before 7-Eleven existed in the country. Khun Matum, the company's third-generation heir, returned home to join the business less than a year before COVID-19 hit, timing he hadn't planned for and couldn't have predicted. The pandemic shut down companies far larger and more established than his family's, but the crisis turned into the company's best year yet. Its skincare products, priced between 25 and 55 baht in 7-Eleven stores nationwide, sold better than ever because people stuck at home, however stressed or depressed, still wanted to look good and now had the time for at-home routines. "Even though people were stressed, depressed, they still wanted to look pretty," he said. "So I was like, oh, okay, COVID was great for us. Isn't that weird?"
The channel his family bet on decades ago turned out to be a genuine advantage. Convenience stores, led by 7-Eleven, account for roughly a quarter of all beauty product distribution in Thailand, industry research shows, with sachet-size and travel-size skincare specifically favored for budget-conscious, impulse purchases. Thailand's broader skincare market has kept growing since, with industry estimates putting it near $3.3 billion and climbing at 9 to 13 percent a year. A company already built around 25-to-55-baht price points in exactly that retail channel wasn't just lucky to survive COVID; it was positioned, ahead of the trend, for the kind of accessible, everyday skincare category that's still expanding.
From "Nong Matum" to "Khun Matum"
Surviving the pandemic didn't settle the harder problem: earning authority inside a company where people had watched him grow up. He described having to be "brave enough to say no" to an uncle-in-law, an aunt, and the grandmother who founded the business, all while trying not to damage family relationships in the process. The starkest version of that tension was managing a finance director who had worked at the company since before he was born. Being called "Nong Matum" (a Thai term for a younger family member) and expected to instead be treated as "Khun Matum," a director with real authority, wasn't automatic. It had to be built, turn by turn, decision by decision.
Don't let them say that you got the position by granted.
"I work hard to be in this position too," he said. Some of that friction came from culture rather than hierarchy. Having worked in the West, where he said people "can just speak thing honestly, like straightforward," he found Thai family business communication far more delicate, even as he insisted the directness was the entire reason he'd been hired. "Why would you hire me if you want thing to be the same?" he said. "You should just keep this budget for marketing budget. It would be better, right? You hire me because you want something new."
Quitting the Family Paycheck to Start Over
Being third-generation came with an assumption Khun Matum grew to resent: that his success wasn't really his. "People say, like, why would you choose this way? Really stupid," he said, describing the reaction to his decision to build something separate. "You already got everything there." His answer was to draw no salary at all. In January, he left the family company to launch Biocell, a new skincare brand built with a business partner who is a skin doctor; Khun Matum runs the factory side. "I wanted to prove to myself, mostly myself and others too, that I could do this on my own," he said. Two values, in his telling, connect every business he's touched (the family company, Tycoon Education, and now Biocell): integrity, because "when people trust you, you can do a lot of things," and genuine passion for the work itself.
Running four ventures at once (the family company, the education consultancy, the guesthouse, and now Biocell) isn't the outlier path it might look like from the outside. A LinkedIn analysis of Gen Z entrepreneurs found that 73 percent report multiple income streams rather than a single job, making them the generation most likely of any to diversify how they earn rather than commit to one employer or one venture at a time. Khun Matum's decision to walk away from a guaranteed paycheck to launch something unproven fits a pattern researchers are tracking broadly, not a leap unique to him.
A Guesthouse Built on Sukhothai's History
Khun Matum's other venture runs on the same instinct to build rather than borrow. Years ago he bought a 120-year-old heritage house in Sukhothai, Thailand's first capital, sitting across from an ancient temple called Wat Phra Pran (a site he compared to Bangkok's Wat Arun) in the Si Satchanalai district. Under the names Akara Houses and Akara Aroma, the property is bookable through Agoda and Booking.com for roughly $3,000 a night. For Khun Matum, the appeal isn't just the location. "Does make us unique," he said of leaning into Thai culture rather than around it. "If you don't have, like, cultures, it's just a house."
The setting carries real historical weight behind that pitch. Sukhothai earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 1991 as the seat of the first Kingdom of Siam in the 13th and 14th centuries, a designation covering roughly 70 square kilometers and nearly 200 individual ruins across the historical park and its associated towns. It's the kind of provenance a hotel brand can't manufacture, and it's precisely why Khun Matum built his guesthouse pitch around leaning into that history rather than smoothing it over into something more generic.
Why He Still Talks to Himself by Name
Asked what advice he'd give students still deciding what to do with their lives, Khun Matum didn't hedge: "Just do it." Take the courses, join the clubs, make the mistakes, go to the parties: anything to avoid regret later. He traced that philosophy back to a single afternoon in Melbourne, hand-delivering résumés to more than 20 stores in a shopping center despite being too shy to ask for a job outright. He didn't get hired anywhere. He still calls it "the happiest day of my life," because it was the day he stopped being afraid to ask.
That same self-reliance shows up in a smaller habit: he talks to himself using his own full name, a way of holding himself accountable for both his wins and his mistakes. "No one could help you except yourself," he said. "Even your friend could guide you, but the one who makes the change is you."
