Jaspal Brand Guidelines: A 1947 Bangkok Bedding Trade, a 1972 Siam Center Store & CPS Chaps

A cloth and bedding trade before a fashion label.

Jaspal began in Bangkok as a cloth and bedding business, not as a clothing label. The Bangkok Post reported in November 2022 that the company was founded in 1947 by Jaspal Singh, an Indian immigrant who had come to Thailand with nothing, and that the patriarch of the Singhsachathet family started out importing linen and bedding products in Bangkok’s Phahurat district. An earlier Bangkok Post feature, published in 2018 for the newspaper’s 72nd anniversary, describes the first goods as terry cloth and bedding imported from the United States, while the Thai trade site Marketing Oops, writing in September 2023, says the bedding and fabric sold in Phahurat came from India. The sources agree on the year and the trade, and differ on where the goods came from.

Fashion came with the next generation. The 2018 feature says it was Jaspal Singh’s sons who moved into importing fashion and accessory brands, and then started their own ready-to-wear label, Jaspal, at Siam Center in 1972. The 2022 report gives the same year for the first Jaspal boutique there. Some trade coverage dates the business from that store: Inside Retail Asia, writing in March 2012, described Jaspal as “founded in 1972.” Both dates appear in the record, one for the family trade and one for the fashion label.

In the early years, the 2018 feature says, the label faced little competition from other local fashion retailers such as Greyhound, Soda, Domon and Theatre. The company was incorporated in 1987, its third-generation executive Yosathep Singhsachathet told the Bangkok Post in 2022.

The family still runs it. Marketing Oops described Jaspal Group in 2023 as a family business passed from father to sons and grandsons, led by the second-generation chief executive Charan Singhsachathet, with the third-generation Viseth and Yosathep Singhsachathet heading business units. By then the company’s legal name was Jaspal Public Company Limited, shortened to JPC.

Own labels, imported labels and bedding.

The group’s own-label business took shape in the 1980s. The company rolled out its in-house brand CPS Chaps in 1980, the Bangkok Post reported in 2022, to keep quality consistent and to respond quickly to what customers wanted. Other in-house labels followed, among them Lyn, CC Double O and Lyn Around, and the paper also listed Misty Mynx, Jelly Bunny, Royal Ivy Regatta and Quinn among the group’s own brands. In 2012, Inside Retail Asia listed the group’s labels as including Jaspal, Footwork, CCOO and Lyn, selling shoes, clothes, bags, underwear and sunglasses.

A crisis pushed the group further towards its own labels. According to the 2018 Bangkok Post feature, after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the fall of the baht, importing goods became harder and more costly, so the company shifted its focus to in-house products. Viseth Singhsachathet told the paper that when Lyn started there was little in Thailand’s middle market offering clothes, bags and shoes with a boutique look at good value. The same feature says the family reviews and remaps its brands every five years.

Imported labels remain part of the business. The Bangkok Post named Jaspal in 2022 as the official distributor of Fred Perry, Melissa, Asics and Diesel, and The Thaiger reported in June 2023 that the group housed 19 fashion brands, including Superdry, and sold clothing, jewellery, shoes, bags, cosmetics and eyewear.

The bedding trade did not disappear. The Thaiger reported in 2023 that Jaspal also made and sold mattresses, bedding, home furnishings and furniture under six in-house and imported labels, among them Santas, Sealy, Tempur and Ethan Allen. The labels have spun off other businesses too: the 2022 report mentions a C.P.S. Coffee shop and a Lyn Beauty line.

Jaspal has leaned on famous faces and partners. The Bangkok Post reported in 2022 that the label had worked with models including Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Gisele Bündchen, and with the television presenter Alexa Chung, and had made special collections with Karl Lagerfeld, Diane von Furstenberg, Orla Kiely and the illustrator Megan Hess, as well as campaigns with Smiley, Disney characters and Garfield.

Design and documentation.

Southeast Asia’s fashion, bag, accessory and lifestyle brands mostly speak through their own channels: a wordmark over a shopfront, a seasonal campaign, a named collection and an online shop. Many began as small businesses (a leather wholesaler, a garment maker, a family shop) and only later built a retail identity, so the brand story is often told through a founding date, a first boutique and a list of markets reached.

Collections and collaborations do much of the visual work. Labels name their lines by occasion, material or season, and add licensed characters, local actors and regional pop stars as ambassadors or muses. These partnerships change from season to season, while the name, the lettering and the shop interior usually stay fixed.

Ownership is often layered. Several labels sit inside larger groups: in Malaysia, Padini Holdings runs Vincci alongside its own clothing labels and sells them together in its concept stores, and Bonia Corporation holds a family of leather goods brands. In the Philippines and Thailand, groups such as Golden ABC and Jaspal Group own more than one label each, and each guide in this series describes its group from that brand’s own sources. Some companies are listed on their home stock exchange and publish corporate pages on founders, directors, subsidiaries and shareholdings; others remain private.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it and when, who owns it now, where it sells and how it presents its name, with dated reporting from newspapers and trade press, and with the companies’ own claims marked as theirs. The palettes and type samples are our own interpretations, not official brand assets.

Bangkok stores, then the region.

Jaspal grew first through Thai shopping centres and then across the region. In March 2012, Inside Retail Asia reported that the group had 120 standalone stores in Thailand, had spent three years in Malaysia, where it had four stores, and had recently entered Vietnam. The Bangkok Post dates the start of the push abroad to 2008, when the company began expanding into other Asian countries with both its own and its imported brands.

By November 2022 the group operated more than 400 fashion stores in Thailand and 67 abroad — 31 in Vietnam, 24 in Cambodia and 12 in Malaysia — according to the Bangkok Post. In June 2023, The Thaiger gave a total of 462 branches.

The company has also prepared for the stock market. The Thaiger reported in June 2023 that Jaspal had filed for an initial public offering on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, with Kasikorn Securities as its financial adviser, and that the listing application and draft prospectus were under review by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the exchange at the time. Marketing Oops reported the same filing in September 2023.

The Jaspal label marked its 50th anniversary in November 2022 with a special collection built on a monogram pattern of the letter J drawn in three dimensions, the Bangkok Post reported. That season’s limited piece was a black-and-white T-shirt with glitter, the Jaspal logo and the number 50. The collection covered streetwear, smart casual and business clothes for women and men.

For a design guide, Jaspal shows how a family trade in cloth and bedding can become a group of fashion labels, each given its own name and register. Compare Pomelo, a younger Bangkok fashion label that started online, and Naraya, another Bangkok brand. For this guide we use graphite, linen and an oxblood red with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jaspal’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.