Full Video: Potato Head Family CEO at Skift Global Forum 2022

Potato Head Family found and CEO Ronald Akili took to the stage to talk about his lifestyle brand’s approach to sustainability. In his conversation with Skift On Experience columnist Colin Nagy, Akili made it clear his company doesn’t compromise guest experience with sustainability.

So much of Potato Head’s choices for hotel building materials and design, partnerships, resort activity selections and more center on the Bali cultural tenet of “duality,” which is about a blending of two apparently conflicting concepts. 

Check out the full video of this discussion. You’ll get to hear Akili tell great stories of his first-hand experiences with environmental destruction in Bali and how they motivate him to take sustainability seriously.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jGkV37D7Dc&list=PL0x2YrE2GNe7UwfeHZxop991vltTmkUa4&index=30

Colin Nagy: Hello. So, I've been writing for Skift for a long time, but one of my favorite columns that I've ever written is about this guy and his brand. And we also have an extra guest on stage here, which seems like it's in violation of the Skift brand standards, but I'm sure we'll talk about that in a second, because it has a good backstory to it. So, Ronald, I want you to explain and set the stage for Potato Head, what it is for those that haven't had the privilege to visit you in Bali, but also your entrepreneurial vision behind it and then we'll unpack that a little bit.

Ronald Akili: We started Potato Head about over a decade now. We started as a restaurant. I've never came from the hospitality industry. We opened up the restaurant, I've always into design art and my wife was a chef and we wanted to open something for her. So we decided, hence the name Potato Head. It was supposed to be a fun project and we grew it from there into beach clubs, hotels and so on. And then now I think we wanted to, we've been in the journey of transforming Potato Head into a lifestyle brand that really with the mission of enabling people to a better way of living. So we do that to our product, services and experiences. And in Bali we have a creative village by the ocean and it's a big playground where music, art, design, food, wellness come together. So people simply go there to have a good time. They go there together to learn, to share. We have hotel rooms, we have restaurants, we have music recording studio, an amphitheater, a gallery space. We have a sustainability lab. So