Connection Thursday is when we step back from ingredients and rituals to talk about people. So far we have introduced you to the women of Munti Gunung who make our packaging, the rainforest cooperatives who harvest our oils, and the customers who keep returning to refill. Today we want you to meet the hands in…
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…
When we set up our first refill station at a small eco-store in Ubud, we thought of it as a logistics decision. Bring a bottle, fill it up, save a bottle from landfill. Practical, quiet, done. Two years later, the host told us something we did not expect. The refill counter had become the slowest…
We talk often about the people who grow, gather, and blend for Utama Spice. The women of Munti Gunung. The Forestwise cooperative in Kalimantan. The small team in our Ubud workshop. There is another part of the community that shapes the brand just as much, and is easier to miss. The people who carry their…
Most of the work happens before anyone is looking. A bottle on a shelf is the smallest visible part of a much longer chain. Before it sits in your hand, there are days of decanting and waiting, hours of rinsing equipment, weeks of small calibrations no customer will ever see. We have come to think…
Most ingredient lists stop at the name. Shorea stenoptera. Cocos nucifera. Pandanus conoideus. A botanical name reads like care, but it leaves out the harder, more honest question: who picked it, and what does the place it came from look like the day after they did. For our illipe butter, our Buah Merah, and several…
In 1989, Melanie Templer started Utama Spice from a kitchen in Bali. The first batches of body oil were weighed on a small kitchen scale, blended by hand, and labelled one bottle at a time. The room smelled of coconut, lemongrass, and warm pressed oil. Almost four decades later, the smell of the workshop in…
Our oldest line is also our shortest. What you give, you get back. Four words, written long before they became a tagline. They began as a principle for how to live, then quietly became the principle for how we source, how we formulate, and how we refill. The shorthand people use now is regenerative skincare….
Eastern Bali holds a village that does not appear on most maps. Munti Gunung is a high, arid place. Water is scarce, rain is unpredictable, and for generations the slope of the land has made farming an unforgiving way to earn a living. For years, this geography meant that women from the village often had…
Deep in the rainforests of West Kalimantan, Dayak communities have been gathering the fallen nuts of the Shorea stenoptera tree for generations. From these nuts comes illipe butter, one of the richest plant-based emollients found anywhere in the tropical world. What makes illipe butter so special Unlike plantation-grown ingredients, illipe nuts are wild-harvested. They fall…