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…
Long before an oil is blended or a balm is poured, someone kneels in the soft ground of a garden outside Ubud and lifts a turmeric root into the morning light. This is where our work really begins, in the hands of the growers who live a short ride from our workshop, and who bring…
On Connection Thursday we tell the stories of the people behind the work. Today we look further back than our own workshop, to the quiet lineage of knowledge that any Balinese blend rests on: the healers, and the grandmothers, who have carried plant wisdom in Bali for generations. A tradition written on palm leaves Bali…
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…