PDM brand is well-known among furniture designers and home-decor lovers for its unique style of indoor and outdoor mats. The concept sprung up to fulfill the demand of high quality, long-lasting household mats that could endure in a climate as hot as Thailand.

Collaborating with an international team of designers, PDM brand spent over a year researching and remodelling to infuse Thai-style mats into a modern designer brand product with the right material fit.

From Finnish designers to local craftsmen and manufacturers, behind the success of PDM is a small team of passionate people who share similar values. We recently had a chance to sit down with Doonyapol Srichan, the Creative Director of PDM Brand to talk about the evolution of PDM and its online success.

Launching a new product

When PDM brand first launched their product in 2013, they relied on social media as their main marketing and sales channels. “We used Facebook, Instagram and also Line to communicate with our buyers. When we first started the online campaign, we only had 2-3 people helping with the business. From product design, manufacturing, to sales and accounting, our small team had to manage it all. Our payments process was also quite manual. Our customers made purchases through our social media channels. They had to pay by bank transfers and manually send in the payslips to our team. At the time, we used excel sheets to keep track of payments and other accounting activities.”

Overwhelmed by multiple tasks to keep the business running; from managing multiple social media accounts to maintaining financial spreadsheets, the team searched for a more efficient solution to streamline their workflow. Their goal is to one day become a fully digitalized SME. After a year of sales through social media channels, PDM realized that they needed an e-commerce website to scale their business online.

“We went on to create our own website to extend our reach as the business began to scale. We had to outsource for both website creation and implementation with a payment platform, then began the journey of PDM and Omise's partnership.”

Shifting from bank slips to online payments

The website acts as a unified platform for the brand. On the customer facing side it tells the brand’s story, serves as a catalogue for their products, and also acts as an online store. Behind the scenes, it helps streamline the internal workflow for the team. Through Omise's consolidated dashboard, PDM abandoned the use of excel spreadsheets and shifted to a digital solution to oversee their financial operations. The ability to accept online payments seamlessly has expanded their horizon as an e-commerce business.

“Currently, our online channels produce around 80% of our revenue and only 20% comes from events and trade shows. We still continue to operate on our social media platforms as well but we try to lead our customers to checkout on our website. Currently, over 50% of our sales comes directly from the website (compared to quite low from before). Since our integration, we never really had any problems with Omise and our accounting management has been a lot easier to handle.”

Besides homes and apartments, today PDM mats are seen in big branded hotels and villas in seaside towns such as Phuket and Huahin. Since launching their own website and integrating with Omise, their manual operations have been significantly reduced. This has enabled the team to focus on new projects. Moving forward, PDM is looking to expand to the furniture industry and will be launching a new app for home decorators and people who love design. Stay tuned!