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When the Platform Becomes the Product
By 2016, Applecrumby had built a thriving e-commerce platform with 9,000 baby products from global brands. Then the founders looked at Amazon's expansion plans and Alibaba's regional ambitions and asked a question that would define their next decade: what happens when the elephants arrive?
In 2016, Sean and Jesmine Tan were running one of Malaysia’s most successful baby product e-commerce platforms. Applecrumby & Fish had grown from 900 products at launch to over 9,000—curating everything from Bellamy’s organic formula to MamyPoko diapers to Nordic Naturals supplements. Revenue was growing 300% year-over-year. They had just graduated top of 500 Startups’ Distro Dojo program. By every conventional metric, the platform model was working.
The elephants in the room like Alibaba and Amazon can easily flood the market with cheap China goods or overwhelm any local platform with superior supply chain management.
That’s when they decided to abandon it.
“The elephants in the room like Alibaba and Amazon can easily flood the market with cheap China goods or overwhelm any local platform with superior supply chain management,” Sean explained to Digital News Asia that year. The founders weren’t panicking about an immediate threat. They were looking three to five years ahead and not liking what they saw.
The decision that followed—pivoting from curation to creation, from platform to manufacturer—would take nine years to fully validate. It meant learning an entirely different business model, surviving a funding desert, and betting the company on products they would make themselves.
The Curation Trap
Applecrumby had started in 2012 because of a gap Sean and Jesmine discovered while traveling abroad with their infant daughter. Organic, toxin-free baby products that were commonplace in developed markets simply didn’t exist in Malaysian stores. The contrast was stark: parents in Singapore, Australia, and Europe had access to products that Malaysian parents couldn’t buy at any price. The couple began importing products for themselves, then for friends and family, then for paying customers willing to pay premium prices for access.
The e-commerce platform model made sense for a market in that condition. Malaysia’s baby product market was fragmented and poorly served online. Applecrumby could aggregate the best global brands, handle logistics, and build customer relationships. No factory required. No manufacturing expertise needed. Just smart curation and solid execution.
And it worked. By 2016, the platform had attracted Malaysia’s first-time parents seeking safer alternatives to mass-market products. The customer base was loyal and growing. The margins were acceptable. The growth was real—300% year-over-year by some measures. Seed funding from Teak Capital in 2014 had validated the concept. The 500 Startups accelerator had polished the execution.
But Sean had seen what happened to e-commerce platforms when giants entered their markets. Alibaba’s Lazada acquisition in 2016 signaled aggressive Southeast Asian expansion. Amazon was making similar moves. These players could outspend any local platform on logistics infrastructure, subsidize prices indefinitely, and negotiate better terms with suppliers than any Malaysian startup could match.
Worse, they could replicate everything Applecrumby had built—the product curation, the brand partnerships, the customer experience—and do it at scale. A platform that merely aggregated other people’s products had no structural moat. When the elephants arrived, they would either crush the smaller platforms through price competition or acquire them at distressed valuations. Neither outcome appealed to founders who had left comfortable careers to build something lasting.
Sean and Jesmine didn’t want to spend the next decade fighting that war.
The Manufacturing Leap
The pivot announced in 2016 was radical: Applecrumby would develop and manufacture its own products. Diapers. Wipes. Detergents. Products that would carry the Applecrumby brand and could not be replicated by competitors simply copying a product list.
This meant learning manufacturing from scratch. Neither founder had factory experience. Sean had been a property investor; Jesmine a freelance interior designer. Their expertise was in curation and e-commerce, not production and supply chains.
The transformation required new capabilities at every level. They needed to understand raw materials—what made a diaper truly chlorine-free, what chemicals to avoid in baby wipes, how detergent formulations affected sensitive skin. They needed manufacturing partners who could meet their quality standards. They needed certifications that would validate their safety claims.
Most importantly, they needed to build products that weren’t just private-label versions of existing items, but genuinely differentiated offerings that justified the brand’s premium positioning. The whole point of pivoting was to create something competitors couldn’t copy. That meant innovation, not imitation.
The platform continued operating during this transition. The 9,000 third-party products kept generating revenue while the founders invested in product development. But the strategic direction had shifted fundamentally. Applecrumby was no longer building a better platform. They were building a brand.
The Chlorine-Free Obsession
The technical focus that would eventually define Applecrumby—totally chlorine-free (TCF) processing—emerged from the founders’ original motivation: keeping toxic chemicals away from their daughter’s skin.
Most disposable diapers use pulp bleached with elemental chlorine-free (ECF) processes. ECF is better than old-style chlorine bleaching but still uses chlorine dioxide, which can leave trace chlorinated compounds. For most parents, this distinction is invisible. For parents who started a baby products company specifically because they couldn’t find safe alternatives, it mattered.
Totally chlorine-free processing uses oxygen, ozone, or hydrogen peroxide instead. No chlorinated compounds whatsoever. The problem: only about 4% of global pulp production uses TCF methods. Sourcing TCF materials at scale means working with specialized suppliers, paying premium prices, and accepting the possibility that competitors using cheaper materials will always undercut you on price.
Applecrumby chose TCF anyway. The decision aligned their product development with their founding story—the parents who started a company because they couldn’t find products safe enough for their own child. Manufacturing their own TCF diapers wasn’t just a business strategy. It was the logical extension of why they existed. “Who says moms have to burn a hole in their pockets to afford quality wipes and diapers for their babies?” Jesmine asked. The answer would require years of product development.
The R&D process would take years and accumulate credentials that competitors couldn’t easily replicate. Dermatest® certification from German laboratories. OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 (Product Class I, specifically for baby products). Halal certification for Muslim families across ASEAN. FSC/PEFC-certified sustainable pulp sourced from Finland. Each certification added credibility—and time—to any competitor’s attempt to match the positioning.
By October 2023, they launched PureBasics—marketed as “the world’s first 100% totally chlorine-free mass market diapers.” By July 2025, they received what they claim is the world’s first utility patent for a 100% TCF absorbent core, branded as GreenCore-Dry technology.
The patent isn’t just about bragging rights. It’s about structural differentiation. Competitors can’t copy a patented core technology the way they can copy a product list. The moat that didn’t exist when Applecrumby was purely a platform now exists because of what they manufacture.
The Nine-Year Desert
The pivot’s validation came slowly—and expensively.
After raising $300,000 from 500 Startups in 2016, Applecrumby didn’t receive another institutional investment until March 2024, when 500 Global (the same investors, now rebranded) led a $4.2 million Series A. That’s a nine-year gap between funding rounds—an eternity in startup time. Most startups that go that long without raising don’t survive to tell the story.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for fundraising. The years between 2016 and 2024 saw dramatic shifts in Southeast Asian venture capital. The early enthusiasm that funded Applecrumby’s seed round gave way to a focus on scale—investors wanted companies that could become the next Grab or Gojek. A baby products company with healthy margins but modest growth didn’t fit the narrative venture capitalists were selling to their limited partners.
How did they survive? The same way Sean had diagnosed the vulnerability of pure platforms: margins.
“From the beginning, we’ve meticulously tracked numbers and prioritised healthy margins,” the founders later explained. “This financial discipline ensured we had the resources to invest in innovation and weather any market fluctuations.”
The practical reality of margin discipline meant saying no to opportunities that other startups would have chased. Aggressive pricing to gain market share? No—that would erode the margins keeping the company alive. Hiring ahead of revenue? No—every new employee had to be funded by actual business, not projections. Flashy marketing campaigns? No—customer acquisition had to pay for itself.
Most venture-backed startups optimize for growth, accepting losses in exchange for market share. The assumption is that future funding rounds will bridge the gap until scale generates profitability. When those rounds don’t materialize, the companies die.
Applecrumby couldn’t count on future funding—and didn’t. Every product launch, every market expansion, every R&D investment had to be funded from operations. This constrained growth speed but eliminated existential funding risk. The company could survive indefinitely on its own revenue.
The constraint shaped strategy in other ways too. International expansion—to Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, South Korea, China, and eventually eleven countries total—had to be self-funding. Each market had to contribute positively before resources shifted to the next one. Singapore expansion alone required weeks of bureaucratic effort just to open a local bank account—friction that venture-subsidized competitors could absorb but that margin-dependent operators had to plan around carefully.
The approach was slower than venture-subsidized competitors. But when the Series A finally arrived in 2024, it wasn’t a lifeline. It was acceleration capital for a company that had already proven it could survive without it.
The operational reality of this funding gap shaped the company’s character in ways that wouldn’t be obvious from the outside. Every decision carried weight. New product development couldn’t be rushed because failure meant real financial consequences, not just another line item in a burn rate calculation. International expansion couldn’t be speculative because each new market had to work.
This discipline became a competitive advantage, though it didn’t look like one at the time. While venture-backed competitors optimized for metrics that would attract the next funding round, Applecrumby optimized for survival. They built a company that could endure—not just grow.
The Validation
By the time Forbes named Applecrumby to its Asia 100 to Watch list in August 2024, the pivot’s logic had been proven.
PureBasics, the mass-market TCF diaper line launched in late 2023, had sold over 250,000 packs. The patent provided defensible intellectual property. The brand had expanded to eleven countries with over 2,000 retail locations in Malaysia alone. The Motherhood Choice Awards 2025 recognized Applecrumby in both diapers and baby care categories—validation from the parents who actually use the products.
More importantly, the competitive landscape had evolved exactly as Sean predicted in 2016. Lazada (Alibaba) and Shopee (Sea Group) now dominate Southeast Asian e-commerce. Pure-play platforms that didn’t differentiate have either consolidated or disappeared. The elephants arrived—and Applecrumby was no longer in their path.
A platform selling 9,000 products from other brands would have been destroyed or acquired. A manufacturer with proprietary technology and regional distribution found a different outcome. The same customer base that once bought from Applecrumby because of curation now buys because of products that don’t exist anywhere else.
The October 2024 partnership with DKSH—a Swiss distribution giant handling Applecrumby’s Malaysian retail expansion—signals the next phase. The brand that started as a website now requires enterprise-grade logistics to reach its markets. The January 2024 appointment of Havas Malaysia as integrated communications agency marked another evolution: from founder-driven word-of-mouth to professional brand-building. The “Applecrumby For All” messaging—communicating premium safety at accessible prices—targets a new generation of parents who never knew Applecrumby as a platform.
The Universal Lesson
Most platform businesses face a version of the question Sean and Jesmine confronted in 2016: what happens when better-funded competitors enter your market?
The instinctive response is to compete harder—raise more capital, cut prices, grow faster. But this is fighting the platform war on the giants’ terms. They have more capital, longer time horizons, and infrastructure advantages that compound over time. The mathematics eventually favor the larger player. Capital reserves, negotiating power with suppliers, logistics efficiency—all favor scale in ways that operational excellence cannot overcome.
The alternative is to stop being a platform entirely. To build something that can’t be replicated by adding engineers and subsidizing prices. To transform aggregation into creation.
This path is harder. Manufacturing requires capabilities that platform operators don’t have. Product development takes years. Mistakes are expensive. The comfortable margins of curation give way to the capital requirements of production. Most platform founders don’t have the appetite for this transformation—it means admitting that the business they built, however successful, has structural vulnerabilities that optimization cannot solve.
But it’s also defensible in ways that platform businesses rarely are. A patented diaper core can’t be copied by adding servers. A brand built around specific manufacturing choices can’t be replicated by subsidizing delivery. Certifications from German laboratories, Finnish pulp suppliers, and halal certification bodies create credentials that take years to accumulate. When the elephants arrive, they find nothing to trample.
The Applecrumby story isn’t about pivot success in the abstract. It’s about recognizing an existential threat before it materialized and choosing the harder path while easier options remained available.
Sean and Jesmine could have sold to Lazada in 2016. They could have optimized the platform, raised more venture capital, and hoped to outrun the giants. They could have accepted the curation trap and waited to see what happened. Any of these choices would have been defensible in 2016, when the threat was theoretical rather than immediate.
Instead, they spent nine years learning to make diapers.
The bet wasn’t validated by venture capitalists or market analysts. It was validated by a patent filing in July 2025, confirming that a platform that started selling other people’s products now owns technology that competitors cannot copy.
When platform becomes product, the game changes entirely.