Melvin Chee, Co-founder & CEO of RPG Commerce.
“Southeast Asia has a very interesting retail market, think about it: Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia are highly concentrated with people who want to go to a shopping mall for various reasons, be it lifestyle or F&B,” says Melvin Chee when The Peak met him one morning for a chat at The RuMa Hotel’s The LIBRARI lounge.
While the retail scene in the region is unique, Melvin also points out that a lot of the retailers in the market are not brand owners, but are either distributors or franchises.
“Whereas we are on the other side of the puzzle,” says the Co-founder and CEO of RPG Commerce. This is where the company approaches retail differently.
“We don’t distribute any brands outside of our in-house brands or we don’t franchise any brands anyway. But we believe that to strengthen our brands in the market, it comes down to owning the brand and understanding the persona and the audience in the market. We’re playing a similar old retail game but we just come in an opposite format of owning the brand from digital to offline.”
While RPG Commerce may not ring a bell to many, the brands under their portfolio such as Cosmic Cookware and Montigo may sound familiar to consumers of a certain age group, particularly millennials who have a penchant for collecting high-quality (and fashionable) water bottles, tumblers and cookware.
Founded in 2017, RPG Commerce is a leading direct-to-consumer social e-commerce company based in Kuala Lumpur dedicated to creating everyday essential consumer products which includes an impressive growing portfolio of in-house brands such as Montigo, Cosmic Cookware, Bottoms Lab, and Thousand Miles to name a few.
Their business model relies on fully owning the development, production and delivery of these products as a way of offering solutions to meet the everyday needs of consumers. Impressively, RPG has seen a quick expansion of their brand folio and customer base growth within the past couple of years.
Initially, Melvin explains the company was built for the North American region rather than for Southeast Asia but the American business took a big hit after Covid. As their portfolio at the time was impacted by the pandemic, this prompted Melvin and the team to take a look at the moving categories on Amazon which were trending during that period to try and scout the next category of products.
It was at this point when Montigo was created, and the home-based products category was something the team understood well. Melvin then decided to build the brand for Southeast Asia rather than in the States.
“That’s how we approached it initially, and the business model has always been that we launch the brand to the market, we monitor the performance for about 6-12 months and then we either decide to double down or to kill the brand,” he says.
Melvin, who grew up in the small town of Sitiawan in Perak, has always embodied an entrepreneurial spirit, although he may not have been aware of this flair during his student days.
“I did a lot of side hustles, and I just wanted to learn as much as possible as a student,” he says.
In 2012, he moved to Melbourne where he spent about six and a half years as a student. After graduating, he spent a year in San Francisco to pursue an internship where he witnessed the daily grind of being part of a Silicon Valley startup.
“That was when I realised I didn’t want to be in a job, I wanted to be on my own,” he says. “Throughout my time as a student, I always wanted to do something by myself and I did a bunch of hustles, selling things in the market to trying to build a digital agency firm to do digital marketing and pretty much just trying to be an entrepreneur throughout my entire life.”
He also dabbled in digital marketing back then and made a decent amount of money as a student, building a US$21 million business as a 21-year-old.
“At that time, I felt money was everything and I just wanted to make money. I built a drop shipping business very early on, then we built a digital consumer products company, which sells anything from China to the rest of the world. We also pivoted multiple times from building a drop shipping business to building a digital consumer brand and we realised we have to be an omnichannel brand,” he says.
Melvin came back to Malaysia at the end of 2018 and started building a small team of about two to three people out of a co-working space. Today RPG Commerce has a team of over 200 employees including those who run the retail side of the business and has since become one of the fastest-growing direct-to-consumer social e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia.
Coming from online to offline and vice versa, RPG today has over 30 retail locations across Malaysia and Singapore, with the aim of ending the year with 40 stores. Impressively, most of these stores were opened within the last 18 months.
There certainly seems to be a high demand for the products RPG is creating, but what kind of consumer trends do their customers gravitate to these days?
I think the big thesis is that we believe this generation, or what we call the “discovery generation”, be it millennials, Gen Z or Gen Y, are moving towards authenticity from authority,” he says.
This notion of discovery also reflects on how the company approaches their marketing, by involving consumers in shaping their next range of products.
“Consumers these days are not just drawn by big brands, they are drawn to brands that connect to them and I think we have always built our brand around that authenticity,” says Melvin.
“The vision and the goal here is to build the next generation of consumer goods companies.”
With this kind of commitment to quality and his genuine interest in coming up with solutions for the everyday consumer, and not forgetting an impressive track record in building products that meet the needs of the market, we think Melvin has a pretty good shot at meeting this goal.
Shot on location at The RuMa Hotel & Residences.
