Current Vine

By Denise Tong

The average woman nowadays is looking for beauty products that not only improve her appearance, but are good for her as well. JUARA, a 4-year-old skincare line inspired by Indonesian ingredients and traditions, offers products that will nourish and improve one’s skin. Founders Metta Murdaya, Yoshiko Roth, Jill Sung, and Tami Chuang have blended Indonesian herbal recipes with Western science to make a high-quality, effective, and luxurious line.

JUARA products contain active botanicals including turmeric, rice, candlenut oil, and teas; they are gentle for everyone to use and do not contain harsh chemicals or preservatives. They are frequently used by makeup artists and have fans including Brooke Shields, Christina Hendricks, Rosario Dawson, and Julianna Margulies; they’ve also been featured in magazines such as Elle, Lucky, Redbook, and Nylon.

The line is carried online at JuaraSkincare.com as well as in stores such as Henri Bendel and Fred Segal.

Read on for Metta Murdaya’s words about the company and what inspires her.

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CV: You get your inspiration from regular trips to Indonesia; how often do you go?

MM: I go to Indonesia twice a year and Bali once a year; I never lack for ideas. I look at ingredients and also traditions, like holistic treatments. There’s a facial massage specirfic to Indonesia. It’s kind of like Javanese massage mixed with acupressure, but for the face. It’s facial massage for beauty. I’m very interested in treatments like that. I look at the spas too—a lot of them are at the forefront of what’s modern and cutting-edge, but using all these Indonesian ingredients. I talk to people about homeopathic treatments and rituals, like boiling cinnamon leaves and drinking it. Juara is based on those colloquial herbal traditions. Spa people, herbalists, and lay people are all still immersed in those traditons.

It’s always a matter of trying to narrow down all those ingredients to ones that can be understood by Americans, fulfill a need, and can be supplied to us within the U.S.

CV: What have been the biggest challenges for JUARA?

MM: One of the biggest challenges is to figure out what the market wants. It’s easy to come up with inspirations for which ingredients you want to use, and for which products. How do you edit it down to the products you want to launch? What is representative of all the ingredients and all the traditions, what makes sense for the marketplace here in the U.S., and what’s the right number of products to launch?

And after you’ve distilled your ideas into these products, how do you put them out into the market? When we started we were the only Indonesian-inspired naturals line out there. If you don’t have the marketing dollars of Estée Lauder, you have to be very strategic about where your products are going to be. How are you going to get people to switch from what they’re using to try what we offer? They’ll like it if they try it, but they have to try it first.

CV: What have been some of the company’s highlights?

MM: I think one good milestone was the owner of Fred Segal saying, before we even launched, “I want your products in our store.” Another one is that our Candlenut Body Creme is still today one of our bestselling products and it was one of our first to come out. Just to get that validation is great. One woman told us, “I wanted to just take a big jar and stick my breasts in it!” And she was about 60, I think!

Also, I think we’ve inspired some people to do what they want. I was interviewed by someone who was thinking about quitting her job and starting her own business. She called me two weeks later and said our interview inspired her, so she quit her job and started her own company—and it’s still going strong.

CV: There’s a growing interest in all things natural and organic. What kind of responses or requests have you gotten from customers?

MM: Last year there was a huge confusion in the marketplace about what’s natural. People were saying, ”I don’t want this, I don’t want that” to ingredients that might be harsh or unhealthy. The criteria got so narrow—no artificial fragrance, or artificial indredients. But once you touch and feel 100% natural, it doesn’t meet your expectations. You need a combination of synthetics to help naturals perform better or just to give them a certain elegance.

But while people often say what they don’t want to find in their natural products, for us, we usually get requests based on what they love. People say things like, “I love your Candlenut Body Creme; can you make a candlenut room spray?” For example, we weren’t ever going to make a perfume because it wasn’t skincare, but so many people were asking for it that we said, “Let’s give it to them.” Now some of our bestselling products are our Candlenut Perfume Oil and our Tiare Jasmine Perfume Oil.

CV: What’s next for you?

MM: In this economy, it’s not really survival of the best, it’s survival of who has the deepest pockets or who’s the nimblest in terms of financing, so right now the plan is to keep getting the word out. We have a complete line out right now, so we need to communicate to people what it’s all about. We do outreach to beauty bloggers, we still work with makeup artists who work with celebrities, and we still do our own press. We’re trying to put word out where it needs to be.