Why an Entertainment Giant Just Bought Into Thai Skincare

Months before Pattree "Cherry" Bhakdibutr sat down with the Students Incorporated team, she had sold majority control of the skincare and spa brand she'd built for nearly a quarter-century. RS Group, one of Thailand's largest entertainment and media companies, best known for music labels and television, had paid roughly 70 million baht through its commerce arm, RS LiveWell, for a 60 percent stake in her company, ERB. The interview she gave co-hosts Premi and HiLight wasn't framed as a story about that deal, but as one about jasmine oil, daily rituals, and running a business on instinct. Listen closely, though, and the deal is the story underneath the story: a founder describing what she gained and gave up the moment an entertainment conglomerate bought its way into her bathroom cabinet.

A Fashion Designer's Detour Into Wellness

Bhakdibutr didn't start in skincare. After a marketing degree, she worked her way up a Bangkok advertising agency, from intern to graphic designer, before landing a job as a fashion designer at Greyhound, the Bangkok label that has fused international style with Thai sensibility since four friends with no formal fashion training founded it in 1980, according to the brand's own history. It was a natural training ground for what came next. "During I was a fashion designer, I found Erb about 25 years ago," she told the students, describing a business built on the same instinct Greyhound had already proven could work in Bangkok: take something international and filter it through a Thai sensibility, rather than import a trend wholesale.

That instinct came from travel. While working in fashion, she noticed Europe's health-and-beauty movement gaining ground and asked herself a question nobody around her seemed to be asking: why not build the same kind of brand, but rooted in the East. "I found that a lot of Thai herbs is quite interesting," she said. "There's a lot of beauty in Thainess itself, Thai products, Thai herbs and medicines and all the things that can be made into products."

The Name Behind the Mishearing

The brand's actual name is ERB, not the common English word for a plant, though the two sound alike enough that the distinction rarely survives a first listen. It comes from an old Thai expression, "erb-im," meaning to radiantly grow, and the naming logic mirrors Bhakdibutr's design instinct: modern packaging built around a traditional phrase. "It looks more like a minimalist style because I have to do modern style with Thai remedy," she said of the brand's early years. "I cannot do Thai style with Thai remedy." Jasmine was the brand's founding scent, chosen, she said, because it represents Thailand itself.

I create Erb for myself and for my best friend ... that's my marketing concept.

That line, unglamorous as it sounds, is close to a real strategy. Her theory of distribution was word of mouth radiating outward from one relationship to the next, and for two decades it worked without an outside investor in sight.

The Deal Behind the Interview

That changed on October 17, 2023, when RS Group, publicly traded on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, formally announced the stake through RS LiveWell, according to the company's own investor announcement and reporting from Kaohoon International and Brand Buffet. RS Group framed the move as part of a broader push into health, beauty, and wellness commerce: it had already acquired the multi-level-marketing beauty brand Unilever Life in 2022 and has kept rolling up commerce assets since, later moving into gift retail with a stated target of 7 billion baht in group revenue. ERB, an established brand with its own customer base and specialized staff, fit the pattern of an entertainment company buying finished expertise rather than building a beauty division from scratch.

The timing lines up with what Bhakdibutr described to the students as a "major transition." Asked how the collaboration had changed the business, she didn't talk about losing her company. She talked about the back office. "Now I'm working with a big company, so I can't focus on product," she said, describing accounts, IT, and other operations she said she'd never understood on her own. In exchange, she said, marketing gained real scale. "The tools and all the facilities to support all the marketing part is going to be a lot bigger," she said. "So we can have a synergy about the marketing part and all the business part."

Why an Entertainment Company Wants In

The move looks less unusual once it's set against Thailand's wellness numbers. The Global Wellness Institute reported in early 2026 that Thailand's wellness economy reached $42.7 billion in 2024, up from $38.8 billion the year before, with the country's spa sector alone growing 18 percent annually and wellness tourism spending up 36.4 percent to $14 billion. Globally, several research firms estimated the clean and natural beauty category at $9 billion to $12 billion in 2026, with double-digit compound annual growth forecast through the early 2030s and Asia-Pacific cited as the primary driver. For a media company diversifying beyond advertising-dependent revenue, a Thai wellness brand with two decades of brand equity and an already-built customer base is a rational, if unglamorous, bet.

It also means Bhakdibutr's ambitions for ERB and her new partner's ambitions for the category point in the same direction, even if they arrived there differently. Asked what she wants for the beauty industry's future, she didn't hedge toward technology at the expense of tradition. "I still believe in natural beauty," she said. "But you know what, for me, it's like I want to be more like synergy with new technology." Pushed on how she balances the two, her answer was blunter: keep the formulas close to 99.5 percent natural, then let technology handle everything else. "No compromise," she said. "That's what I aim for."

Bhakdibutr also pointed to something the data backs up: beauty is no longer dominated by a single place in the world. "When I was young, you know, like the only trend in the world is it's dominated by Europe or USA," she said. "But now the trend is so much more than that. Now there's a Korean trend, there's a Thai trend, you know, there's a European trend." That fragmentation is what's opened room for a brand like ERB to compete as more than a regional also-ran to Korean or Japanese beauty exports, and it's part of why a Thailand-based conglomerate would bet that a stake in it could travel beyond Bangkok.

What the Brand Looks Like Now

The clearest evidence of the RS Group investment showed up after the interview aired. ERB's storefront at Emsphere, the Bangkok mall that opened its doors in December 2023, expanded in 2025 into an installation called the "Erb Heavenly Odyssey Chamber," built as a walk-through fragrance museum marking the brand's 25th anniversary, according to Thai-language coverage of the opening. It's a scale of retail spectacle a single-founder wellness label rarely gets to build on its own; it's the kind of "bigger facilities" Bhakdibutr said she was hoping the corporate partnership would deliver.

She closed her interview with advice aimed less at the deal she'd just made than at the decades of decisions that preceded it. "I think you have to believe in what you are good at," she told the students weighing careers in beauty and wellness. "If you really know what you like, or if you really know what to believe, or if you really know what are you good at, it's got to be easier for you to reach the goal." It's advice that reads a little differently once you know it came from someone four months into learning what happens after the thing you built well enough to believe in gets folded into something much larger than yourself.

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