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The Tapping Tapir is going places despite the pandemic

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From popsicles to canned drinks, this trio is still growing and exploring new business strategies despite Covid-19 uncertainties.

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Free Malaysia Today
(L-R): Co-founders of The Tapping Tapir Victor Tee, Tee Reei Toh and Ivan Lee. (The Tapping Tapir pic)

The Tapping Tapir started out as a popsicle business called Potong.

Co-founders Ivan Lee, Victor Tee and Tee Reei Toh, all from corporate backgrounds, first introduced their products at an artisanal market in Kuala Lumpur. However, encouraged by the public’s response, they began supplying cafes soon.

“The ideology from our core brand value being all-natural, and already working with the fruits, there were certain flavours that we couldn’t do. For example, hibiscus and lime where the flavors are a bit more delicate. So, we then actually stepped back and decided to switch the business model.”

Six months later, The Tapping Tapir was launched at the end of 2013. Ivan shares how they switched the business model to suit a 60% local market (they were operating on 60% exports before this) and what the trio has learnt from their nine-year entrepreneurial journey.

How has Covid-19 shifted your business model?

Pre-Covid, we were probably doing 60% export, and 40% in hotels and local consumers. Right now, I would say our local sales are around 60 to 70%. We only sent two containers for export in 2020 when compared to sending two containers every month.

In January 2020, Mandarin Oriental in Macau and Singapore informed us that they were not going to take any more orders until further notice. This was indefinitely, which is unheard of.

So, I already knew early on that our overseas businesses were going to take a big hit. In March 2020, we negotiated a deal with the freight companies. We also launched our canning line and pushed our advertising during the MCO.

With Facebook advertising, we basically survived or made it through the last few months through our online channels.

The benefit of going to B2C is a higher margin of earning as the products go straight to the end consumer. That’s how we got through this period.

Free Malaysia Today
Bajo’s canned watermelon and starfruit drinks. (The Tapping Tapir pic)

Please elaborate about your latest series, Bajo

We wanted to release the BAJO series (canned products) for two reasons:

  1. We wanted to differentiate our brand between the glass bottle and the can because there was a premium with the glass bottle. That’s why we launched the cans specifically to target a different market and drop the price.
  2. The benefit of the canned beverage is packaging. It’s lighter and shipping costs are a lot cheaper.

How did you choose which flavours to launch?

Let’s take the Bajo series. Coming back to our core value of all-natural flavours, we wanted to have it as a clean, hydration sports range.

Based on our research, with a largely Malaysian consumer-base, they are health conscious but they also want flavors, and not to the point of zero sugar.

With Bajo, we did the first launch with the starfruit commercially, and watermelon too. Both of these fruits have a lot of juice, a lot of hydration.

Producing the watermelon line was quite difficult. You can’t cook the watermelon because it changes the freshness of the flavour. So, our team’s expertise in trying to preserve the drink was really put to work. It took us six months before we succeeded.

To be honest, we made a lot of stupid entrepreneurial mistakes at the start .

Free Malaysia Today
The Covid-19 pandemic meant a drastic change in their business model. Rather than serving an export market, they now serve local customers. (The Tapping Tapir pic)

Tell us more about the mistakes

We moved our operations a lot. It wasn’t really necessary. We’ve moved five times in a span of seven years, which cost us quite a bit of money and time. To give you an idea, the capital for the latest factory set up and renovations is at least RM1 million.

When your business grows, that capacity just leaves no option but to move out because we grew quite fast, in that sense. But right now, we’re optimistic with the future.

Another oversight would be not focusing on the local market. In the early days, people saw our brands in cafes or bazaars, but in the last four years, we were just busy building our brand on an international scale.

The pandemic has pushed us to think harder about who to serve. Now that customers are supporting SMEs and local businesses more than they normally would, we need to strengthen our local presence.

Now, when switching our business model to be more locally focused on B2C, it’s easier for us to get product feedback.

Referencing my good friend and fellow entrepreneur, Christy Ng (a well-known local brand specialising in women’s shoes and accessories that gained momentum through online retail), her strategy was to stay hyper-focused on serving the local market and targeting online sales.

What are the way of funding to scale the business

For SMEs, my advice is to explore other avenues for capital or funding besides getting investors in. Especially in Malaysia, there are organisation grants.

When external investors come in, it brings in a lot of opinions and it gets very difficult to manage a business when you’re basically just starting out, wasting a lot of time and energy chasing our beliefs.

I think SMEs can take a better route, depending on your business strategy. We just want to grow a financially viable business.

What is the focus of The Tapping Tapir moving forward?

Our business strategy is to focus on the local market and e-commerce. We just got a deal with Petronas and did a pilot run with them for Makan Mesra – a premium upscale grab n’ go concept.

If everything goes well, we’re launching our can series with Petronas. Personally, I am excited about our new partnerships, tapping into new markets. I think there’s a lot of room for us to grow domestically.

This article first appeared on Set the Tables.

Set the Tables is positioned to inspire and educate those already in the industry as much as the aspiring reader who dreams of a future in the food business, and maybe even the merely curious tantalised by the vast and irresistible universe of food and drink.

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