David Jou had an excellent reason for refusing to open a shop: he was building an online fashion business. His customers had an equally excellent reason for asking him to open one: they wanted to try the clothes on. For a while, each side kept its position. The customers, inconveniently, kept filling out the surveys.
Jou later described three years of asking shoppers what they wanted. Roughly half asked for a physical store. For the first two years, he held to his view that e-commerce was the direction of travel and customers would come around. By the third, the answer was still there. Pomelo opened a shop. It did well.
There is something endearing about a technology entrepreneur being defeated by a fitting room. There is also a useful explanation of Jou’s career in it. He likes systems, data and the prospect of a large market. But his decisions have required him to revise the system when ordinary people found something awkward about using it.
A box before a blouse
Long before Pomelo, Jou was dealing with possessions that needed to be somewhere else. As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he started a shipping and storage business for university students. The Boxing Co. addressed the seasonal nuisance of moving belongings between a dormitory, home and storage. Glamour was in short supply. Demand was easier to spot.
He also bought and resold used textbooks. That business moved from selling in person to eBay, giving him an early encounter with selling online. Both ventures had a wonderfully unromantic starting point: students had expensive books and too much stuff. A person willing to organise the transaction could make himself useful.
Jou’s childhood had involved moves of a different kind. Born in Germany to Korean parents, he grew up across Germany, Korea and the United States, and holds an American passport. He later lived in Beijing and New Delhi, and backpacked through Southeast Asia after college. By the time Bangkok became his business base, crossing borders was familiar.
New York came first professionally. At Bain & Company, he worked on the strategic problems of large businesses. At New Mountain Capital, he moved into private equity and learned how companies were financed and valued. It was an education in what a business looks like from the boardroom and the investment committee. The wish to start something of his own persisted.
Student storage → online textbooks → Lazada Thailand → Pomelo.
Different merchandise. A recurring interest in making the transaction work.
The Bangkok calculation
A meeting in Manhattan with Rocket Internet’s Samwer brothers introduced a possibility: help build e-commerce in Southeast Asia. Jou hesitated over leaving New York, then visited the region to investigate. Thailand offered a developed retail sector alongside improving payments, connectivity and smartphone use. He helped launch Lazada Thailand in 2012 and served as managing director.
Bangkok appealed to him as a place as well as a spreadsheet. He described it as international, yet small and charming, with other regional cities a short flight away. That combination mattered to someone thinking about a regional business. So did the prospect of bringing a broader fashion selection to customers beyond the usual shopping districts.
Lazada gave Jou experience in marketing, delivery, operations and cross-border commerce. It also sharpened a question. A general marketplace could sell almost anything. What might happen if a business concentrated on one category and took responsibility for more of the experience?
With Casey Liang and Win Thanapisitikul, he began working on Pomelo in autumn 2013. The public launch followed in early 2014. Bangkok supplied fashion talent and a customer base; the founders supplied experience in making online commerce function. Clothes would demand another education. Selling a recognisable phone and developing a garment involve rather different kinds of judgment.
Fashion has a physical objection
One influence came from Seoul’s Dongdaemun market, where Jou watched retailers sorting through newly delivered fashion. The pace interested him. He saw a way to bring that supply-chain rhythm together with an online business in Thailand. The name Pomelo came from the regional fruit: something fresh, recognisable and pleasantly free of technical terminology.
The company’s early operation was small. Jou recalled seven people working from a condominium in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit area. His own interests lay in technology and e-commerce, so he made repeated trips to Korea to learn about trends, products and suppliers. Building a fashion business required learning the product, rather than assuming the website would do the difficult part.
By 2016, he was discussing the attention Pomelo paid to fit: styles went through three to five fittings, with sizing adapted to its customers. Feedback travelled back to product development. The process made a practical concession to the body wearing the garment. A photograph can offer inspiration; it has limited authority over a waistband.
The customer surveys exposed the larger version of that problem. However much people liked browsing online, they still wanted to touch fabric, check a size and see themselves in the clothes before committing. The store requests kept coming. Eventually Jou accepted that the customer’s definition of convenience included a place to stand in front of a mirror.
“We started the business because we wanted to help digitalize the fashion retail industry.”
David Jou, 2020
Three verbs, one useful pause
Pomelo’s answer became Tap.Try.Buy. A customer selects items online, has them sent to a store or partner location, tries them on and pays for what she keeps. The order of events is the point. The fitting happens before the financial commitment, so an unwanted garment need not become the customer’s return errand.
Choose styles online.
Check the fit in person.
Pay for what you keep.
This changed what a physical location could be for. Alongside conventional stores, Pomelo developed pickup spaces with fitting rooms and partnerships with other businesses. By August 2022, it had 26 physical stores across four Southeast Asian countries and more than 100 partner locations. Cafes, salons and florists appeared in the network. A fitting room had become a service that could travel.
There was a financial logic underneath the customer convenience. Displaying an entire catalogue requires room; letting someone browse digitally and try selected pieces changes the space needed. The garments still have to arrive at the right place. Jou’s old interest in moving things around had found a considerably better-dressed application.
Technology remained central. In 2020, he described personalised recommendations based on preferences such as price, size and colour, alongside demand forecasts for new styles. Those predictions informed inventory decisions. The machinery behind a pleasing shopping experience included the decidedly less photogenic question of how many units to order.
The trouble with an impressive CV
Jou’s accounts of management are appealingly willing to include mistakes. Earlier in his career, he hired people whose backgrounds resembled his own. Shared education and experience made communication easy. Building Pomelo pushed him toward specialists with abilities he lacked: people who cared deeply about materials, visual design, styling or operations.
In 2021, he discussed other missteps with investor Jungle Ventures. Moving too quickly into controlling more of the product process had brought quality problems. Trying to manage overseas markets remotely had also disappointed. Local general managers needed ownership, with central teams supplying tools and support. Expansion required giving other people room to exercise judgment.
The same discussion returned to cash. Even an easier fundraising round took more than six months, he recalled. Keeping enough money available to pay employees was a basic responsibility. Fundraising may produce a celebratory photograph, but payroll turns up with rather greater regularity. His emphasis gave the exercise a less theatrical purpose.
Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, alongside a network of more than 100 partner locations.
The business behind the clothes
Over time, Jou also looked at selling the capabilities Pomelo had built. In May 2021, he outlined plans for Prism, a business offering other fashion and lifestyle brands services including demand planning and logistics. Levi’s was among the customers identified at the time. The operational work behind selling clothes could itself become something to sell.
His interests extended beyond the transaction. In 2020, he spoke about customers seeking inspiration and community, rather than simply promotions. Fashion provided a creative dimension to a business full of forecasts and delivery schedules. People wanted ideas for how to dress, and a way to express themselves, alongside the reassurance that a purchase would fit.
That attention to people also appeared in The Pomelo Podcast, which he hosted with colleagues. Guests discussed their working lives and paths into the company. A February 2021 episode featured head of design Sakhila Wattanasri talking about becoming a designer and working on licensed collections. The CEO’s role, for a while, was to ask the questions.
Another door opens
In August 2025, Jou was discussing Pomelo at the opening of its first Philippine flagship, in Glorietta 1, Makati. The entry was made with Stores Specialists Inc. The store brought the same sequence to another market: choose through the app, then have the clothes ready to try when you arrive.
Another regional partnership followed. In November 2025, F J Benjamin announced exclusive rights to operate Pomelo in Malaysia under an agreement effective that month, initially lasting five years. For Jou, the collaboration paired Pomelo’s digital retail model with an established operator’s local retail experience. It was a concrete expression of the lesson about letting expertise live closer to the customer.
His stated ambition remains regional: build a fashion and lifestyle platform for Southeast Asia, with technology running through the operation. The revealing part is how that ambition has accommodated a correction. The founder who expected shoppers to grow comfortable with an online-only proposition ended up helping bring their selections into fitting rooms across borders.
Jou once said he would spend less energy running around and more finding the right strategy if he could do things again. Pomelo’s store story gives that thought a useful shape. He asked a question, disliked the answer, asked again, and eventually acted on it. The customers had been quite clear. They wanted somewhere to try the trousers.