The Towel Thought Experiment: What a $0.30 Pair of Underwear Taught Me About Building Real Brands in Indonesia

I wasn't planning to write this. It started as a casual conversation with a friend about his towel business. Three hours, four rabbit holes, and one brutal reality check from a founder I know later, I had a full thesis on why the most boring product in your bathroom might be the most interesting business opportunity in Indonesia right now.

Let me walk you through the whole thing, raw.

How It Started

My friend sells towels. Not glamorous. He didn't build an app, didn't raise a Series A, didn't get featured in TechCrunch. He just sells towels. But here's what got my attention — he built his brand social-first, burned his first few batches of inventory just to get awareness, and when he crossed 10,000+ units produced, retailers started coming to him. Not the other way around.

That's when I started thinking: what if the most defensible business model isn't the one chasing the next trend — it's the one selling the thing that never goes out of trend?

The Problem with Most Business Models

Trends change. Algorithms shift. Competitors flood in overnight. Social media platforms hold your audience hostage. AI tools you built your whole workflow around get commoditized in 6 months.

Most businesses are on a treadmill. Fashion brands need new collections every season. Tech services need to update their stack. Content creators need to stay relevant. The whole game is one of constant reinvention.

But what if you just... didn't play that game?

Towels. People buy them. People always will buy them. There's no expiry date on a towel. It doesn't go out of style. It doesn't need an update. Nobody's disrupting the towel with AI. When yours wears out, you buy another one. When someone has a baby, you buy them a towel. When someone gets married, towel. When someone moves into a new house — towel.

This is the thesis: stable demand, quality moat, brand loyalty, no trend chasing.

Building the Filter

Before I went deep on towels, I ran a thought experiment. What are all the products that fit this model? The criteria I set:

No expiry date — can sit in warehouse indefinitely
Universal demand — every human needs it
No size/fit dependency — avoids dead stock nightmares
Not trend-driven — demand is structural, not cyclical
Premium price viable — quality justifies higher margins
No fragrance or subjective preference barrier — you don't have to "like the smell"
Low entry complexity — you can start without a factory or a PhD

I mapped out 12 product categories and filtered them down. The ones that survived and hit 20M+ units sold annually in Indonesia:

Product	ID Market Size	Units/Year	Price Multiple
Bath Towels	~$210M	35–45M	9×
Face Towels	~$20M	15–22M	8×
Underwear	~$276M	90–95M	8×
Socks	~$80M	60–80M pairs	8×
Pillowcases	~$20M	20–30M pairs	6.5×
Hand Towels	~$40M	20–28M	6.5×
Dish Towels	~$25M	18–25M	5×
Plain T-Shirts	~$320M	120–150M	6.75×

Price Multiple = midpoint premium price ÷ midpoint mass market price

The Charts

Price Multiple by Product

Bath towels, face towels, underwear, and socks all sit at 8× or higher — meaning premium can command 8 times the mass market price. That's the brand-building argument in one number.

Indonesia Ecommerce GMV Growth

Indonesia crossed $75B in ecommerce GMV in 2024. It's heading to $100B+ by 2026. This is the third largest ecommerce market on the planet, and it's growing at nearly 19% annually. Any physical product brand that ignores this channel is leaving serious money on the table.

Market Size by Category

Underwear is the biggest single category at $276M, but bath towels at $210M with a 9× price multiple and zero dominant local DTC brand is the more interesting play.

Why Towels Win

After running all 8 through the lens of: can a brand actually be built here, who are the real competitors, and can a new player win — towels came out on top. Here's why:

Socks still have sizes (even if S/M/L works for most people, there's a fit conversation).

Underwear has serious size complexity and the returns problem.

Face towels are interesting but the purchase frequency is unclear for most consumers. I think a skincare brand can just come and take the market share

T-shirts have Uniqlo, Erigo, and thousands of Shopee sellers making it the most competitive battlefield on this list.

Towels? Universal fit. No returns. People gift them. People need them for babies, for guests, for themselves. They wear out and get replaced. The only question is: which brand do people reach for? Or is it color sensitive ?

In Indonesia right now, the answer for premium is: nobody local has truly cracked it on the social-first side.

The Real Education: A Founder Friend (A.T.)

Here's where the thought experiment got grounded in reality.

The same day I was doing this research, I called up an old friend — let's call him A.T. — who's been running a premium underwear brand for men in Indonesia for the past 3–4 years. I asked him to be honest with me about how it's actually going.

He was.

The price reality: He sells at Rp 130,000 per piece (~$8). The cheapest underwear in Indonesia? Rp 5,000. That's less than $0.30. At convenience stores, you get 3 pieces for Rp 24,000 — about Rp 8,000 each (~$0.50). The mass market floor is almost free.

The consumer mindset problem: When someone in Indonesia wants to spend on premium underwear, they don't reach for a local brand. They reach for Calvin Klein, Under Armour, Uniqlo, Cotton On. Why pay $8 for an unknown local brand when you can pay $9 for a brand that's universally understood as premium? That's a brand-building mountain that takes years to climb.

The gender insight: He targeted men. Big mistake, he said. Men don't care if their underwear is torn. They wear it until it falls apart. Purchase decisions are driven by external events — girlfriend, birthday, a mother buying for their son. The decision-making is not their own. Meanwhile, the average Indonesian man owns 10 underwears. The average woman owns 30 — thongs, bras, bikinis, different styles for different purposes. Women shop with intention. Men don't.

The platform trap: Here's the brutal number. Shopee raised its commission from 8% to 20% between 2023 and 2024. That single change destroyed his margins. His net profit went from around 20% to 2–3%. He's now entirely dependent on a platform that can change the rules on him overnight. He's tried launching his own website but it hasn't gained momentum yet.

The co-founder problem: His co-founder left. Went back to India. A.T. is doing this alone now, having moved into his wife's family's house to keep the business alive. That's the honest reality of building a premium product brand in a price-sensitive market without the right backing.

The Shopee Margin Kill — Visualised

This is the most important chart in this whole post. One platform policy change wiped out 85%+ of net margin. This is the platform dependency trap — and it's the single biggest risk for any ecommerce brand in Indonesia right now.

What A.T.'s Story Actually Tells Us

A few things:

1. Premium underwear for men in Indonesia is a hard market. Price floor is Rp 5,000. International brands have the premium perception locked. The B.A.M. window (Basic, Available, Modern) is tiny and crowded.

2. Shopee is not your friend long-term. 8% → 20% commission. No warning. No negotiation. If your entire business is built on one marketplace, you're one policy change away from being unprofitable.

3. The towel advantage is even clearer now. Towels have no international brand that dominates mind-share in Indonesia. There's no "Calvin Klein of towels" that the middle class defaults to. The premium lane is genuinely open. And towels are giftable at scale — no awkwardness, no size, no gender — which means marketing writes itself.

To Start or To Invest?

Here's where I landed. Two real options:

Option A: Start a Towel Brand

This is the full founder journey. Social-first, B2C brand building, burn the first few batches for awareness (exactly what my friend did), scale to 10,000+ units where retailers come to you, then use retail credibility to open B2B channels (hotels, hospitals, gifting companies) with better margins and bulk orders.

What it takes:

$20,000–$50,000 to get to the first 3,000–5,000 units with basic brand packaging
12–18 months of content and community building before retail approaches you
A real content engine — TikTok, Instagram, live commerce
A co-founder or someone running the operational side so content doesn't kill you

What the upside looks like:

Gross margins of 50–65% on DTC premium towels
Brooklinen (US equivalent) hit $100M revenue in 5 years
Indonesian context means lower capital required to reach similar relative market share
B2B hotel/hospital contracts are high-volume, lower-churn revenue once brand is established

Option B: Invest in Existing Towel Brands

Find brands that have product-market fit and customer base but are stuck in one distribution channel. Open new channels for them — specifically B2B — and take equity or revenue share.

What to look for:

Brand doing Rp 500M–2B/month ($30K–$120K/month) revenue on Shopee/offline retail
Has repeat customer base and strong product reviews
No meaningful TikTok Shop presence or B2B channel
Founder is operational/product-focused, not content-focused

What you bring:

TikTok Shop / social commerce infrastructure
B2B introductions (hospitality, gifting, corporate)
Content system and creator network
Distribution strategy and channel diversification — which also reduces their Shopee dependency risk

Deal structure options:

Revenue share on new channels opened (20–30% of incremental revenue)
Equity stake (5–15%) in exchange for distribution build-out
Advisory + performance fee hybrid

The right entry point:

Post product-market fit — they have reviews, repeat buyers, a SKU that works
Pre serious scaling — still founder-led, no institutional backing
Revenue in the Rp 300M–1.5B/month range ($20K–$100K/month)
Open to a partner, not just looking for cash

The Final Take

The boring product is often the best business. Everyone chases the next app, the next AI tool, the next trend. Nobody is building the next great Indonesian towel brand with a real social engine behind it.

The market data is real:

Indonesia home textile market: $3.5B in 2024, growing to $6.2B by 2032
Ecommerce GMV: $75B in 2024, heading to $100B+ by 2026
Live commerce and social shopping: 25% of ecommerce volume
Cotton-based home textiles growing at 18% annually in Indonesia
No dominant local DTC premium towel brand exists with a social-first identity

The playbook exists. My friend already ran version 1 of it and made it to retail. Version 2, with a real content infrastructure behind it, could be something much bigger.

The only question left is: do you want to build it, or back someone who is?

This started as a conversation. I'm still figuring it out. If you're building a home essentials brand in Indonesia — or if you're an investor looking at this space — I'd genuinely love to connect.

Hit me at jay.ventures

Data sources:

The Golden Towel