When Yuttana Anothaisintawee, managing director and eco designer at Triple Pim Co, set up his company in 2008, he did it for his employees.
Mr Yuttana shows a handbag made of inner tyre tubes. He says he will focus first on expanding his recycled fashion products in Asia.
The designer of the ReMaker brand started to create products from recycled material as an original equipment manufacturer in 2004. For around four years, he had Japanese firms as clients without having his own brand.
"They were our only group of clients. We did not think of seeking new customers," he recalled.
Unfortunately, the Japanese clients later turned to lower-cost Chinese manufacturers.
"I felt really bad because we had to look after our employees at that time, and we didn't want them to be out of jobs. So I thought that from now on [in 2008] we needed to have our own brand or else the problems would drag on," said Mr Yuttana.
New collections are released every six months. The current collection involves 10 products, including bags made from clothes and the inner tubes of motorcycles, bicycles and trucks. It also has pencil cases made from motorcycle inner tubes.
The Bangkok company exports 80% of its products to countries such as France, Germany, Sweden and Japan, and it is trying to gain more sales in Europe.
"At first we could not sell our products in Thailand because most customers here did not understand our concept and why it had to have an increased value. That's because our costs are very high," said Mr Yuttana.
When the business started, Mr Yuttana received most materials, of which 90% are recycled, for free to create the new products. They included tyres that he collected from various garages while shouldering transport costs.
"When we obtain the materials, they are very dirty. Things such as rust stains are very hard to clean," he said, adding that items must be so clean as to not stain clothes, which means they must be cleaned four or five times.
A tyre from trucks, motorcycles and bicycles, for instance, is bought for an average of 80-90 baht and cleaned for many hours before being used for sewing by hand.
With 10 employees, most costs lie in labour and time-consuming production processes.
Other materials include billboards and second-hand clothing such as jeans, neckties and working clothes.
"What we look for is leftover material used in the industrial sector that has an extreme oversupply. Those items are not used for anything else and are destroyed at the end," Mr Yuttana said.
"The reason why we use industrial products rather than agricultural ones is because the former is harder to degrade than the latter."
Billboards, for instance, are scattered all over the place, with movie billboards used for at most two weeks and then removed. Billboards can withstand the sun and rain, and can be used for years in design works.
Mr Yuttana, 40, who graduated in political science from Ramkhamhaeng University, received this year's Design Excellence Award and the Prime Minister's Award.
Triple Pim does not have a shop of its own yet, but Mr Yuttana will focus first on expanding its presence in Asia, where its main customer base is in Japan.
"We are getting new customers from Hong Kong and Singapore who are interested in our products, and I think our Asian customers will increase, particularly when the Asean Economic Community takes place in the next few years," he said.
His business, however, did not start out completely from scrap, but out of a passion for creating fashion from second-hand clothes.
"Then, my friends wanted me to do things for them, and it turned out that a Japanese designer became interested," he said.
His brand became well known in Thailand when the government invited Mr Yuttana to design products by using upcountry labour.
"We met many skilled people that did not have a market or knowledge of design. They wanted to expand their market, and in the future we plan to support this idea in order to increase our production capacity," he said, adding that the most important thing is skill and quality, as the products need to be exported.