The Erawadee story is older than the name

Thai traditional medicine has existed for some twenty-five centuries. Generation after generation, herbalists passed their knowledge on by word of mouth and wrote it down on palm and bamboo leaves. The oldest manuscripts that have reached us were made more than six hundred years ago.

They were kept safe by a herbalist family from U-Thong, who passed them to Erawadee; today they live in our archive. These are the first pages of our story, and the voices of the healers who wrote them can still be heard.

The oldest formulas we work with were created by a herbalist who treated people during the reign of King Rama VII, between 1925 and 1935. Her grandson, Mr Pichet Lerttamsak, kept those recipes safe and handed them on.

In Chonburi, grandfather Joy Sangawong made a remedy by hand for everyone who came to him for help. He left his formulas to his grandson, Sommai Phattandilok, with a single request: keep them.

His grandfather was not Sommai’s only teacher. Some of the recipes came from Pichet Lerttamsak, and he studied traditional medicine with the daughter of the owner of the Buan An Tueng pharmacy, where his grandfather once prepared remedies. Three lines of Thai herbalism meet in his work.

Another line leads to U-Thong. Around 1945 Champi Chomya — who had studied Thai traditional medicine at Wat Pho and held licences in Thai pharmacy and medicine — began trading medicinal herbs. His shop, Champi Phesat, sold dried herbs and ground them into powders by hand, with his eldest son Warin Chomya helping. Warin later started a business of his own, and our U-Thong factory grew out of it.

Erawadee’s founder, Pitchaporn Prachakwimon, grew up in Chumphon in the south of Thailand. Andrographis, clinacanthus, plai and black pepper grew in the garden behind the family house, and from them her mother, the local herbalist, made remedies for the neighbours.

Pitchaporn went on to read ecology at Prince of Songkla University and took a master’s degree. Her studies gave a scientific account of what her mother knew by experience and instinct.

The first herb shop opened in Kanchanaburi in 2006. Six years later, in 2012, the first pharmacy opened in Pattaya — and with it the name Erawadee.

Pitchaporn Prachakwimon was not looking for suppliers but for people who treated herbs as she did. That is how the stories of the families from U-Thong and Chonburi were woven into one Erawadee story.

The brand was named after Erawan, the three-headed elephant of Thai myth.

One of the central symbols of Thai mythology is Erawan (Airavata), the majestic three-headed elephant that carries Indra, god of rain, thunder and fertility. In the Thai tradition Erawan stands for wisdom, prosperity, protection and harmony with nature.

Legend has it that Erawan appeared during the great churning of the Ocean of Milk, when gods and demons sought the elixir of immortality. Its three heads stand for the unity of past, present and future, and for the balance of sky, earth and underworld at the root of the Thai view of the world.

His mother matters too — the celestial elephant Iravati, who embodies a gentle but unshakeable feminine strength, compassion and maternal love. It was this old legend that moved Pitchaporn Prachakwimon to build a brand joining the wisdom of Thai heritage to a respect for nature and for a person’s inner balance.