Connection Thursday: the family that has kept this going since 1989
Every product we make begins in the same small workshop it has always begun in, on the same island, with many of the same hands. This is Connection Thursday, when we step back from the ingredients and talk about the people. Today the people are the family who started all of this, and the family who carry it now.
Utama Spice began in 1989, when Melanie Templer started blending oils and botanicals in Bali, learning from local healers and the grandmothers who had used these plants for generations. What began as a small practice of care became a brand, though the word brand still feels a little large for something so hand made. Nearly four decades later, the work has passed, mother to daughter, into the hands of Ria Templer, who leads as founder and brand director.
Ria did not inherit a formula so much as a way of working. Alongside co-founder Skyler and director Nyoman, and a team of makers who blend and pour every batch by hand, she keeps the same principles her mother set down: source honestly, waste little, respect the tradition you are borrowing from, and never promise more than a plant can give.
Why continuity is its own kind of care
There is a quiet advantage to a business that stays in one family and one place. Nobody has to relearn why the illipe butter comes from a particular forest, or why the packaging work goes to the women of Munti Gunung. The reasons are remembered because the people who chose them are still here. Care is not a campaign we launched. It is closer to a habit that has been kept, day after day, since 1989.
That continuity reaches all the way back through the supply chain, to the forest families in Kalimantan who wild harvest for us, and forward to you, opening a bottle at the end of a long day. The same intention runs the whole length of it.
So when you use one of our oils or balms, you are not buying from a corporation that happens to like nature. You are borrowing the work of one family who have spent 37 years learning how to make good things gently. We think you can feel the difference, and we are grateful you let it into your ritual.
