FBT

FBT began with a man who knew how to sew leather and a punctured ball. Kamol Chokephaibulkit arrived in Bangkok from China in 1947 and made his living repairing leather goods until, in 1950, someone handed him an imported football to fix. He studied its stitching, understood the secret, and began making balls by hand in his own home, two or three a day, in a Thailand where people still played with coconut balls. In 1952 he founded the Football Thai Factory, FBT for short, and never stopped: a first shop in Siam Square in 1961, balls presented to King Bhumibol in 1963, official sponsorship of the 1966 Asian Games in Bangkok, FIFA certification, and since 1992 the unique status of equipping Thailand's national teams at the SEA Games, the Asian Games and the Olympics. The factory that made three balls a day now makes twelve thousand, feeds over 300 stores and exports to 40 countries, with the wheat ear logo serving as a national signature. It is Thailand's answer to the question all of Southeast Asia asked in the twentieth century: why buy abroad what we can stitch at home.