When the LVMH Prize talent scout found Cherry and Home Teerapat, the couple had been running their Bangkok store for only a few months. They had applied for the prize three times before and been rejected each time. This time, they had decided not to apply. “We had thought we wouldn’t apply, since our shop had been open only for a few months and we were so busy with it,” Home says.
The scout’s nudge felt like too pointed a sign to ignore. They applied anyway—and became the first Thai brand ever selected as a semi-finalist, transporting themselves into a brief, dizzying showcase during Paris Fashion Week.
Then they came home.
“It was a little sad at first,” Cherry admits. “I remember when we first came back, I felt a little bit overwhelmed and depressed, because there was apart of me that had hoped that we could use that money to get bigger—but that part of me kind of died in Paris.”
What she discovered in its place was something harder to manufacture and more useful: absolute certainty about what Nong Rak is, and what it refuses to become. “That’s not to say that the other designers weren’t putting in thought, because they definitely were—but the things the judges connected with were more commercial, scalable, or institutional,” Cherry explains.
The logic of the LVMH Prize, it turned out, was simply not Nong Rak’s logic. “I look at our brand right now,” Home says, “and I hope a lot of other small brands think to themselves that being a small brand is their strength.”
This conviction was forged slowly, and not without difficulty. The couple met the way great love stories tend to begin: accidentally, in the rain. Cherry, an American, was living in Bangkok working as a nanny, dabbling in photography, painting, and illustration, when an unexpected downpour sent her rushing into a nearby café. Home was already inside. “It was raining hard, so I invited her to come into the shelter, you know?” he says. “And then we started talking, and then we exchanged contacts, and that’s how we met.” Seated side by side against the unadorned wall of their Bangkok apartment for this interview, they exchange glances before most answers—the kind of shorthand that takes years to develop.
Their creative collaboration went through several iterations before landing on knitwear and silk: photography, styling, set design, and eventually reselling vintage. It was the vintage that shaped them.
“We were really inspired by a lot of vintage pieces we had been selling—things that looked like they were made by grandmas, or that didn’t have tags and were obviously handmade,” Cherry says. They became students of old clothing, studying notions and closures, vintage patterns and sizing, trying to understand why garments made decades ago carried more character than almost anything available today.
“Now that we’re working on cut-and-sew pieces with Thai silk, we’re using purely vintage patterns as starting points, whether it’s pieces from our own closets or sourced from vintage markets,” Cherry says. “Clothes that have more function, that fit more sizes, you know?” Home adds.
The early years were not easy. Shortly after their son was born, the couple relocated to New York and found themselves in the trap familiar to almost every emerging designer: critically admired, financially precarious.
“We had this little baby, and we had our apartment, and it was getting hard to make rent,” Cherry says. “It was frustrating, because the brand was doing really well, but we still weren’t really able to get our heads above the water.”
The return to Bangkok was as much financial necessity as creative instinct. But Bangkok, it turned out, was exactly where they needed to be—a city teeming with craft, community, and a quality of fierce local pride that New York and Paris simply could not offer.
“Here, people are so excited and enthusiastic about supporting their friends, or even supporting someone they don’t know, if it’s helping the city to be uplifted,” Cherry says. “Obviously, from the fashion scene side, to leave New York and the West is [thought of] like certain death,” she adds bluntly. “But I haven’t felt that at all after coming back. I feel, if anything, we will survive better here in the long run.”
There is a texture argument at the heart of everything Nong Rak makes. The brand describes itself as “sensory focused” and “anchored in tactile experience,” and the pieces bear this out entirely—thin layers of artfully crinkled Thai silk, mohair knits brushed out to create fuzzy halos, shredded ribbons of fabric woven neatly into dresses.
Viewing them through a screen produces a specific, slightly maddening frustration: the urge to reach through the glass and touch. Cherry has a theory about why that impulse matters more than ever. “It seems like we’re being conditioned as a society to move away from making things, and that’s really detrimental,” she says. “Using our hands is a cathartic part of being human. I was even reading about how the lack of real buttons in our daily lives has this effect on our minds—that everything is without texture and it kind of smooths our brains out, too.”
A Nong Rak piece is the antidote. It is also a quiet rebuke to the logic of modern fashion—an industry that has become, as Cherry sees it, less about clothing than logistics, optimised to churn out trend-forecasted products at scale and velocity. Nong Rak operates on entirely different terms.
“A big thing for us is slowing our production down so that we’re only producing what’s necessary,” Cherry says. “Nong Rak was never purely about commerce.” If you want to commission a piece, you arrange a consultation with Cherry to discuss colour, shape, and occasion; the result is made from vintage mohair yarn or locally sourced silk, by Cherry and Home’s own hands.
If you want to buy one in person, you visit their sole Bangkok store, staffed by Home alone. There is no e-commerce drop. There is no wholesale account. There is no expansion plan. For Cherry and Home, the friction and time that come with making something entirely from scratch are not inconveniences to be engineered away—they are the point.
It is a philosophy they intend to extend outward. They envision the Bangkok boutique as the anchor of a growing community—one that might host workshops, exhibitions, and collaborations with other craftspeople.
“We want to expand it past ourselves. Doing workshops, or exhibitions, or inviting people to use their hands could be really empowering,” Cherry says. “It’s not really a solidly business-forward plan—if we do workshops, it wouldn’t be for profits, you know? We would hopefully cover costs, but it would be more about world building.”
Home frames the broader ambition simply: “We want to work with people who we really look up to, and create a community of sustainable ideas and sustainable minds.”
What does success look like for a brand that has consciously stepped back from every conventional measure of it? At this question, the couple exchange a glance—the same glance, it seems, they have been exchanging since that rainy evening. Then Cherry answers. “We both grew up with nothing when we were younger. So we were sitting at dinner the other day, and we were looking at each other and thinking, can you believe it?” she recalls. “We have this apartment—we don’t own it, but we like it. And we have our bed, and our business, and look at the dinner we have. So we’re just grateful for how far we’ve come—it’s crazier and wilder than we could have ever imagined.”
This story first appeared in the June/July issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
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