Backstage at Thai Design’s crafting facility in Chiang Mai, Mila Devenport and Kim Carvalho take a moment of pause: one sofa, two cups of tea and the distant hum of 80 jewellery artisans at work.
Mila is the Founder and Chief Educational Officer of Kigumi Group, a social enterprise that promotes digital wellbeing, AI ethics and cyber safety. With Mila’s lead, Kigumi Group provides training, curricula, and parent coaching to help schools, corporations and families navigate the online landscape responsibly.
Kim, meanwhile, is the Managing Director at the helm of Thai Design: a family-owned jewellery manufacturing business that creates high-quality silver and gold jewellery for partner designers and brands across the globe.
Mila is in the business of the most rapidly evolving industry to affect human life; Kim’s work is in preserving time-honoured craftsmanship, championing generational knowledge and nurturing long-term partnerships. Though rooted worlds apart, there’s a common thread between Mila and Kim’s passions. Both are women in business whose lives are dedicated to protecting what gets lost when efficiency becomes the only goal: judgement, care and the human relationships that no system can replicate. In an exchange of thoughts about the collective resistance to facelessness, Mila interviewed Kim on the shape of Thai Design – a business built around people.
Watch the full interview on YouTube
As Thai Design’s third-generation owner, Kim sits at the intersection of a 50-year family legacy and a rapidly changing global market. The business was born when Kim’s grandfather began sending Thai-manufactured jewellery from Thailand to her parents in London, who would sell it on to retailers or trade it wherever else they could find a buyer. From those informal beginnings, a serious enterprise was soon founded: exhibitions, wholesale partners and eventually a purpose-built manufacturing plant on land that had belonged to Kim’s grandfather, enveloped by the rolling green hills and centuries-old craft traditions of Chiang Mai.
Today, Thai Design collaborates with independent designers and emerging brands across the globe – from the UK and Europe to North America and Australia. Every piece of jewellery is developed and crafted entirely in-house, from initial concept and design development through full production and finishing.
"Every stage after the casting or stamping… It’s all done by hand," Kim explains. "That's TLC. That's a lot of care and love going into the jewellery."
In the early years, when the family's facility in Bangkok could only handle certain stages of the process, the rest was outsourced. With outsourcing came the problems that still trouble manufacturing jewellery businesses today: inconsistent quality, unpredictable delivery times and a loss of control that challenged meaningful customer relationships. Thai Design’s decision to consolidate all facets of production beneath one roof in Chiang Mai changed everything. Now, each piece of jewellery is quality-checked at every stage before it moves to the next department; customers receive live updates, photographs and videos of their orders in progress.
Pictured: Kim (pictured in her mother's arms!) visits her grandfather's plot of land, where the Thai Design crafting facility now proudly sits
The community dimension of the move was monumental too, with many staff relocating from Bangkok to Chiang Mai with the business. Kim’s parents built on-site accommodation for the staff members new to the city in Northern Thailand, which remains available to members of staff today. Some of those original employees are still working with Thai Design decades later, with some even welcoming their own children to the team to continue the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and skill.
"Business is all about people," Kim says, "So we have to really nurture and develop those relationships.”
At Thai Design, this philosophy applies equally to the team on the factory floor and to the designers commissioning work from the other side of the world.
What makes Thai Design’s model unique is who those designers tend to be. Whilst the previous generation of the business worked primarily with wholesalers requiring volume orders and mass production, Kim has subsequently steered the company towards something more intimate: working directly with independent designers, many of whom are at the very beginning of their journey. Thai Design's minimum order quantity (MOQ) is just 20 pieces in sterling silver and as few as five in solid gold, with no minimum spend: a deliberately low barrier to entry.
"We've got customers who've reached out and haven't even designed their website yet," Kim says, "But they're doing their research, finding manufacturers first. We create a sample for them, let them approve it, and then they know they don't need to hold much inventory."
The reward, Kim finds, is in watching those customers grow. On more than one occasion, she’s checked a client’s website months after their first order to find an entire story and brand identity taking shape around the new collection. With these relationships comes the quiet satisfaction of having played an instrumental role in a venture from its earliest days.
Alongside these newcomers are a number of long-standing clients, some of whom have remained loyal to the family business since Kim’s parents' era. The relationship, in every case, is paramount. Thai Design is selective about who it takes on as a partner: an aligned budget is not enough without aligning values. "If you're here to get something really cheap and you don't care about the quality and who made those pieces, you're not the right customer," Kim explains.
Pictured: A collection of sterling silver biochar-inlaid necklaces produced in collaboration with our partner charity BioChar life
The question of identity - Thai brand or global brand? - is one Kim navigates with easy confidence. Contrary to what the business’s name might suggest, the jewellery Thai Design manufactures does not adhere to a particular Thai aesthetic; the designs belong entirely to the customers who commission them. By and large, those customers are contemporary designers and brands from around the world. What remains proudly Thai about the business is its core: its people, its symbolic location and the traditional craft skills that have been nurtured and passed down over generations. Thai Design prides itself on its role as an SME that directly contributes directly to the economy and artisanal ecosystem of Chiang Mai.
Rarely a simple object, jewellery has, for millennia, been designed, crafted and worn to embody deeply personal significance. Unlike other transactional purchases, jewellery is often an investment which begins telling a story from the moment it’s acquired. Understanding the enormity of this role, Kim takes pride in Thai Design’s commitment to the human touch. A memorial locket, for example, passes through a number of skilful hands at the Thai Design crafting facility, each responsible for a specialist stage in its creation. This artisanal approach is the opposite to a single stamped unit, shipping off identical copies, each one of 1,000. The compassion of authentic Thai craftsmanship can be felt – even if with Thai Design’s commitment to meticulous consistency and quality.
Looking to the future, Kim's priorities divide (almost) neatly into two. Internally, she’s focused on lean production: reducing waste, nurturing her team’s attitudes and skillsets, and shifting the culture towards continuous improvement. This focus has become especially prevalent since Kim and her family upped sticks and relocated from London to Chiang Mai three years ago, enabling her to spend her working days on the ground at the crafting facility, working significantly more closely with HR and developing personal relationships with every member of her 80-strong team.
Externally, the work is about deepening relationships with customers and celebrating handcraftsmanship on a more visible scale. From sales strategy to marketing, this is a practice in authentic storytelling, knowledge-sharing and celebrating the time-honoured, hands-on craft techniques that Thai Design specialises in.
In an industry being quickly reshaped by automation and artificial intelligence, Thai Design is making a different kind of bet. For more than 50 years, Kim and her family have remained committed to the work of human hands and the meaningful relationships built around it; a value that no machine can replicate.