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Wonderfruit's 'Pete' makes passion pay off
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Wonderfruit's 'Pete' makes passion pay off

The founder of one of Thailand's biggest music festivals has his hands full with the family empire and various side projects.

Mr Pranitan's passions have always rested with his side projects, of which Wonderfruit is the best known.
Mr Pranitan's passions have always rested with his side projects, of which Wonderfruit is the best known.

'There's only so much time in the day, it just depends on how you manage it," says Pranitan "Pete" Phornprapha.

Time that is spread thin across organising a musical, helping run a motor vehicle company, starting new ventures, familial obligations and idealist pursuits, separate spheres that more than often overlap.

It's been only a few weeks since the last Wonderfruit music festival, Mr Pranitan's ambitious four-day cross-cultural event, and he is already back to work planning the next one, writing down ideas, tightening up back-end processes and meeting with staff. This makes up his afternoons.

His mornings he helps his family, one of Thailand's richest (father Phornthep Phornprapha is worth more than US$1 billion), run Siam Motors Group, best known for producing Nissan cars and trucks in Thailand, but also for their joint ventures with over 60 other companies.

"You can say Wonderfruit is very different from Siam Motors Group, but there's many similarities," Mr Pranitan says. "In the end you're dealing with people, creating a brand and preserving it. There's still a very beneficial aspect from a company that's been around 68 years and a company that's in its infancy. I can take the spirit of both and apply it to one another."

Mr Pranitan, 40, grew up bouncing between North America and Bangkok, studied at a boarding school in Massachusetts, then a business university outside Boston, before earning his bachelor's degree from the American University in London.

In 2008 he moved back to Bangkok to work at his family's company. His dad put him in a junior position at Bangkok Komatsu Sales, the SMG subsidiary distributing Komatsu construction equipment. Over the past 10 years he's grown into many responsibilities at SMG, now as CEO of Komatsu Sales and director of multiple other joint ventures. He's also deeply involved in the business strategy of the company alongside his little brother.

According to Mr Pranitan, there's not much infighting or sibling rivalry between the two brothers and his older sister, a retail and fashion entrepreneur. He says there's no set plan on who will take over the company after his father; more than likely they'll just delegate responsibilities based on their individual strengths.

"We're starting to understand each other's strength and how we can complement each other. I think that's key in a family business," he says. "These are discussions we are having in our family, what's our strength and how can we contribute."

But Mr Pranitan's passions lie with his side projects, growing to encompass more and more of his time.

He began with a sushi franchise. In 2010 he and four partners opened Sushi Den in Bangkok. At first he was very hands-on, taking orders and serving dishes, making up for a small staff, all while still working under his father. Today there are 22 branches of Sushi Den in Thailand, and Mr Pranitan takes a more hands-off role. Around the same time as the restaurant venture, he also started the company Vespiario with some friends to sell Vespa scooters.

Some of his side projects included some failures, though. Mr Pranitan says his biggest flop was Morimoto, the high-end Japanese fusion restaurant, a franchise started by celebrity chef Masaharu Morimoto. The restaurant opened in 2016 and closed last August.

Wonderfruit is not just a music festival, but a mixture of art, food, advocacy and technology.

"I made a big mistake," he says. "I should never have done a brand that was not my own, that I didn't love. I like the brand and thought it would do well, that there was a void in the market, but I wasn't passionate about it."

This lack of passion meant that there wasn't enough time for him to be hands-on in the business to see it succeed: "If you're passionate about something, you make time."

Mr Pranitan also launched a tech startup called Asiola, a crowdfunding site for artists, that he says is "winding down". Even so, he relished the opportunity to get inside Bangkok's startup scene and meet some of the partners he works with today on the Wonderfruit festival.

"Wonderfruit is way more challenging than opening a restaurant, perhaps a hundred times more," he says.

The largest taker of Mr Pranitan's time among all his side projects, Wonderfruit is not just a music festival, but an amalgamation of art, food, advocacy and technology. During the day, high-profile speakers from business and activism come to give talks on topics ranging from blockchain to resource sustainability.

Last year's festival, staged outside Pattaya in Chon Buri province, drew 17,000 people. But Mr Pranitan wants to expand, both the brand and the festival, into something greater, something of "cultural significance" for the country.

"What Wonderfruit represents is very significant for Thailand and Asia as well," he says. "If you think of Burning Man in America or Glastonbury in the UK, those have huge cultural significance for those countries, but we're not trying to be a Glastonbury or a Coachella or a Burning Man.

"There's a huge weight of responsibility if we want to steer it to where we want to steer it. It's inspiring, but it's also very real. That's the excitement as well. There's a real sense of purpose in creating something culturally significant. Or you could slip and it becomes a trend and just a big party."

The festival prides itself on sustainability. It bans people from bringing in plastic, and it plants trees to offset any negative environmental impact, keeping the event carbon-neutral.

Wonderfruit represents the artistic idealism of Mr Pranitan, in seeming contradiction with the hyperpractical business world of Siam Motors Group, a company that makes and sells the machines that help the nation run, yet ironically hurt the environment he strives to protect.

"I want to make people vulnerable to ideas, to think about things like where does food come from, is it organic, is it GMO, what does GMO even mean," he says. "Understanding these things brings you from somewhere more idealistic to somewhere more practical, so you can come up with solutions and actually change it."

Mr Pranitan's father, for one, now 70, supports his pursuits and has been at every Wonderfruit since 2014, despite the event taking time away from his son's duties at Siam Motors Group.

"He doesn't really care for the music, but he likes the food," the son says.

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