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Rob and Paul Forkan were just teenagers when the tsunami hit the Sri Lankan coastline where they were holidaying with their family.
Their parents Kevin and Sandra were swept away and the pair were forced to make a gruelling journey across the country to safety with their two younger siblings but without money or passports.
Years later, their experience of the tragedy and a desire to honour the memory of their parents led them to set up Gandys – an ethical footwear company that channels 10% of its profits into funding projects for orphans and underprivileged children in Sri Lanka.
“Thankfully we survived along with our younger siblings but our parents weren’t so fortunate so we had to kind of hitchhike back home from the bottom of Sri Lanka to the top to get to the national airport to get home so that was something that was a huge thing in our life which is why we do what we do now and we’re trying to do all that we can to make a success out of Gandys and continue our parents’ legacy,” said Rob.
The experience of returning to Sri Lanka this year – their second – will be an emotional one for the brothers.
The brothers returned to Sri Lanka for the first time last year.
Speaking to Reuters before their trip, both were focused on the positive impact their charitable work will have.
Their children’s home in Mau Gama – near the capital Colombo – will be halfway to completion when they see it.
The “kids campus,” as they describe it, will provide educational, medical and nutritional services to 400 children.
“Most importantly we’re going back there to do something super positive. To be going back ten years later after all of what we’ve been through and experienced to be going back there to build our own kids campus and help other children which like ourselves have probably been put in a terrible situation if we can help just a few of them get back onto a positive path and you know in ten years’ time they can look back and say that you know they were helped and can now do something then it will be worth doing it.” said Rob.
Their passion for charitable work was not born solely from what happened to them ten years ago.
At just 11 and 13 their parents took them out of school for four years to travel around India where they volunteered in deprived areas and children’s homes.
This experience – or real life learning as Paul termed it – has much to do with their quiet determination to succeed in business and make a significant impact with their charity work.
It also made them better prepared to make it to safety after the tsunami, said Paul.
“Doing the volunteering work we always saw children worse off than what we were. So when it happened we were kind of like a little bit tougher than if we were just there on a two-week holiday. And then in terms of setting up this we’ve had some real highs and some real lows and after being through the tsunami kind of like it’s given us a no fear approach to things as well,” Paul said.
Gandys began life as an idea dreamt up in the brothers’ south London bedroom in 2011 after an unusual inspiration.
Rob had woken up at a music festival with, as the London slang saying goes, “a mouth as dry as Ghandi’s flip flops.”
Modifying the spelling, Gandys was born.
The company now has more than a dozen staff and has sold 250,000 flip flops.
The colourful rubber made flip flops are made in China and Sri Lanka and already sell in some of the UK’s premier shops including Selfridges and Liberty.
Although the social element was always at the heart of the company, the brothers initially avoided making a connection between their own story and their goal of building children’s homes.
But once they began to tell the story of their tsunami experience, interest in both their business and their social projects took off.
“We haven’t been going to long, so we’ve only been going a couple of years. So like a year ago I was sleeping on Rob’s sofa in Brixton. But over the last few months it’s kind of exploded.
We’ve just launched into David Jones in Australia and we’re launching in Thailand and Indonesia and Singapore. So it’s literally... we’re slowly planting our flip fops in different countries so it’s really exciting.”
Such has been the level of interest in the charity projects the brothers have set up a foundation which allows people to donate directly.
As for the future, they hope to see further growth in their business and build more children’s homes around the world - enabling two orphans who will always value the help they received when they most needed it to give back to others like them.
