Rob and Paul Forkan lost their parents in the 2004 Asian tsunami (海啸). Now, over ten years later, they’re using their flip flop (夹脚拖鞋) business to help others.
The brothers had an unusual childhood. They were just 11 and 13 when their parents, Kevin and Sandra, took them out of the UK education system and moved the family to Goa in India. There they mixed with the local community.
It was when the family were on holiday in Sri Lanka that the tsunami hit. Although the children managed to escape, their parents tragically couldn’t.
But Paul says their upbringing (教养) meant they were able to cope with this tough blow.
“Our parents gave us this confidence that we could do anything, that nothing was hard to achieve,” says Paul.
What the boys did was start a business selling sandals. They say they can make money and do good at the same time: they give 10% of their profit to charity (慈善机构), and have set up their own foundation (基金会) through which they’ve been able to open a children’s home in Sri Lanka.
Nonetheless, the brothers had problems early on with the quality of the flip flops, which were handmade in India.
“If you brought in 100, you could only sell 10 of them, because of poor quality control,” says Paul.
They were able to solve the problem by moving production to a factory in China.
And what about the sandals themselves? They’re called ‘Gandys’ after the father of India’s independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi.
“He was in all our schoolbooks as kids, he’s on all the money over in India, he’s famous for wearing his flip flops,” says Paul.