Connection Thursday: the women of Munti Gunung, and the hands behind our packaging
Some of our story is written in oil and botanicals. Another part is woven by hand, in a village most visitors to Bali never see.
Munti Gunung sits in the dry hills of North Bali, above Tianyar, where the land is steep and rain is scarce. For generations, families here had few ways to earn a living close to home, and many left to look for work in the south. The women who stayed carried the weight of that absence, holding households together with very little.
Craft as a way to stay
What changed was work that could be done where they live. Weaving with lontar palm, a skill passed between mothers and daughters, became a livelihood rather than a pastime. When there is a steady reason to make something, and a fair price for making it well, a woman does not have to leave her village to support her family.
This is the quiet logic behind our partnerships. We would rather buy from the hands that need the work than from the cheapest factory that can imitate it.
Why the packaging matters
It would be easier, and cheaper, to wrap everything in plastic. We choose woven and natural materials in part because they are beautiful, and in part because that choice keeps a craft alive and a community paid. Care for the person who uses the product and care for the person who made it are, to us, the same instinct.
This is the same conviction behind where our ingredients come from. Our rainforest oils travel through a cooperative model rather than an anonymous supply chain, something we wrote about in Connection Thursday: Forestwise, and the rainforest cooperative behind our oils, and the same care shapes ingredients like the illipe butter in our body line. Munti Gunung is that same belief, expressed in palm and thread instead of oil.
The takeaway
Connection is not a marketing word for us. It is the actual structure of how the business works: ingredients from a cooperative, materials from a village, and a belief that a product is only as honest as the way it was made. When you hold something woven by the women of Munti Gunung, you are holding their skill, their patience, and their choice to stay.
