Before a refill order reaches your door, it usually passes through someone’s hands twice more than you would guess: once at the counter where it is weighed and poured, and once more on the back of a motorbike, riding narrow stone lanes that a delivery van could never fit through. In Ubud, this is Made’s…
Every refill station has a person behind it. At our Ubud shop, it is often Wayan, who has poured Lavender Liquid Soap into the same brand of glass bottle for three years now, and who remembers which customers prefer it a little less diluted. That memory is the part of refill culture that does not…
Buah merah, the deep red fruit of the Pandanus conoideus tree, grows almost nowhere outside the highlands of Papua, at the far eastern edge of Indonesia. For generations, Papuan families have harvested it by hand: climbing to reach the heavy, oblong fruit, then slow-cooking the pulp for hours over open fires until it renders into…
Before an essential oil ever reaches a diffuser or a dropper, someone spent a full day with their hands in the ground. Vetiver is a good example. The plant itself is unremarkable, a tall grass that grows across Indonesia’s hillsides. What matters is underneath: a dense mat of roots that can take fifteen to eighteen…
Most coconut oil begins its life in a plantation where the pickers, pressers, and packagers rarely meet the brand whose label ends up on the shelf. The commodity system is efficient. It is also anonymous. Utama Spice does it differently. Our cold-pressed coconut oil comes through the Aluan Partnership, a sourcing relationship built to keep…
Care for skin and care for a place are the same instinct, followed to different ends. On Connection Thursday we introduce the people we work alongside, and today we want you to meet the ones standing knee-deep in Bali’s rivers, pulling out what the rest of us threw away. Their name is Sungai Watch, and…
Some of the ingredients we love most do not begin in a lab or a factory. They begin in a forest, in the hands of families who have worked the same groves for generations. Illipe butter is one of them, and this Connection Thursday we want to tell you where it comes from. A butter…
When people ask us where their money goes when they buy a bottle of soap or oil, we like to answer with names, not slogans. One of those names is Munti Gunung. Munti Gunung sits in the dry hills of East Bali, a part of the island most visitors never see. There are no rice…
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…
Every jar of illipe butter we blend begins somewhere most people will never see: the forest floor of Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, where the illipe nut falls from towering Shorea trees at the end of the wet season. It cannot be farmed on demand. The trees fruit on their own rhythm, once every…