New bed bath idea just what doctor ordered
AS a doctor doing his ward rounds, Bunlue Kongchai saw first hand just how labour-intensive it is for nurses to give bed baths to immobile patients.
Depending on the patient’s limitations, the process would take anywhere from an hour to three hours.
These observations inspired Bunlue to come up with a product that would reduce the time required for bed baths and make the overall task easier for busy nurses.
The owner of Barami Laboratories Co Ltd, which has been producing skincare products for other companies’ labels for many years, Bunlue plans to launch the Soap Shower Sheet under the company’s own BRE brand in the domestic and overseas markets in the second half of this year.
The company targets sales of up to 10 million sets for the first year, and the product is protected by patents secured in Thailand and overseas early this year, the company’s managing director and founder, Bunlue Kongchai, said in an interview with The Nation recently.
“I spent a year to research and develop what became the Soap Shower Sheet, after I saw the arduous nature of how the nurses bathe patients in their beds,” Bunlue said.
“They would spend typically at least one hour or as much as three hours per patient on this task. And that’s how it’s been done for more than a hundred years.
“That motivated me, as a medical doctor who graduated with a degree from Khon Kaen University, to devise an alternative approach. I wanted to come up with a way that would reduce the times it takes for bed baths and to make the procedure easier.”
A year after he started out in his research, Bunlue had produced the Soap Shower Sheet. The innovation takes in two steps. First, the cotton fabric that contains soap is rubbed across the patient’s body, cleaning the skin. In the second step, the cotton fabric that has some ingredients that absorb the soap is worked over the skin; a moisturising substance is also applied.
The end result is that the patients feel clean and refreshed, as if they had a regular bath, Bunlue said.
He tested the product on many patients in a hospital setting, before securing the patents from the Commerce Ministry and from patent authorising bodies overseas.
The Soap Shower Sheet has been recognised with a win in the ageing society category, corporate, at the Thailand Green Design Awards 2018 (TGDA2018).
The awards were conducted by the Kasetsart Agricultural and Agro-Industrial Product Improvement Institute (KAPI) of Kasetsart University. The winners were named in March.
Bunlue spent Bt20 million this year to set up the machinery to produce the Soap Shower Sheet.
With production planned to start in the second half of the year, the output will average at 1.5 million pieces a month.
“Our target customers include not only those looking after patients in hospitals or aged-care facilities, but also sports people who need to freshen up on the go, as well as tourists who do not have time take a shower in a tight travel schedule,” Bunlue said.
With the testing of the product on the target customer groups behind him, Bunlue is confident on the prospects for sales at home and abroad.
He is eyeing sales of to 10 million sets a year at an average price of Bt60 each. Half of the sales are expected from the home market, with the rest from overseas, including Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East, the Philippines, Japan, China and Russia.
Bunlue said that the Soap Shower Sheet will be released under his first own brand BRE, drawing on the company’s long experience in making skincare products under its customers’ brands.
Bunlue established Barami Laboratories in 1995 for the research and development of skincare products for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to put out skincare products under their own brands. Such businesses made up his first target customer group.
I graduated as medical doctor with qualifications in skin care,” Bunlue said. “When I wanted to become entrepreneur in the field, I started to do research and development into skincare creams and sold these products to a skincare clinic run by friends.
“With this success from the clinic sales, I decided to expand my target customer base to include the mass market with a focus on SMEs that want to sell skincare products under their own brands.
“I offer them the advantage of small sizes for product purchases, starting from Bt3,000 per product. This is appealing for SMEs with smaller budgets. This strategy has seen the business grow at a double-digit rate every month, and the company is now generating sales at an average of Bt70 million a year,” Bunlue said.
After Bunlue’s years of success in producing skincare products for sale under his customers’ own brands, the BRE Soap Shower Sheet becomes the first of his company’s products to go out under an in-house band.
