Holistic Beautifier,
Director of Martha Tilaar Spa and Puspita Martha International Beauty School
“A holistic beautifier” is how Wulan introduces herself on her social media. To beautify Indonesia and Indonesian women inside and out, is also the motto of the 100% home-grown beauty empire that she co-leads with her mother, instilling women empowerment into every single aspect of the enterprise.
“I was ‘brainwashed’ since my childhood to work for a woman-sensitive business!”, Wulan cheerily jokes. Seven years before Wulan came into this world, her mother, Martha Tilaar, established her first beauty salon in the family’s garage of a residential district in Jakarta. Wulan was born the same year her mother created her first makeup brand, and grew up along with the enterprise’s impressive expansion to become one of the country’s largest purveyors of natural beauty products and services.
Her parents were both progressive teachers, practicing equal parenting and both convinced of the role of education as the key to improve the people’s livelihood, whether male and female. Before she herself got married, Wulan advised her husband that she would never choose between being a mother, a wife and a working woman. But walking in the shadow of “The Mother of Indonesian Natural Cosmetics”, was a challenge she was not ready to take on. She went to study in the United States, where she gave birth to her first child and started to build a life of her own. After nine years away, her mother invited her to come back to Indonesia to handle the enterprise’s new spa franchise, affiliated to a therapist program for underprivileged girls. “To create jobs and new life paths for other people is priceless,” said her mother. That sentence struck a chord with Wulan, who realized the true purpose of her mother’s business and decided to champion this mission too.
Women empowerment is one of the four “core pillars” of the enterprise. It goes beyond the traditional donor-recipient approach of corporate philanthropy and ensures that women can work to build a path to their own development, rather than making development work for them. Through the spa therapist scholarship program, Wulan has successfully implemented a shared value strategy, providing the girls with therapist skills that will give them alternative routes to escape unsafe and precarious career paths, while nurturing a well-trained and loyal workforce for the enterprise. After the training, they are given the choice to work three years for the Group, or to build their own business, supported by a network of 5000 alumni who provide support as peers and role models.
The holistic approach means that Martha Tilaar goes beyond women economic empowerment, touching upon the underlying social and cultural barriers women and girls face in isolated communities. The local anchoring of the brand and its penetration within the communities, allows Martha Tilaar to be both the corporate that supplies the funding or the mentoring program, and the grassroot organization that listens to the needs of the communities and builds trust with them. Beyond the vocational training program, Wulan established the Roemah Martha Tilaar (“Martha Tilaar’s House”) in 2015 – a cultural and community center designed to provide a “safe house” to vulnerable young girls in Gombong. The regency has one of the highest rates of early teen marriage in Indonesia, correlated with higher rates of early pregnancy, divorce and domestic violence. The House organizes various activities to cultivate the girl’s creativity, self-confidence and entrepreneurial spirit, whilst promoting local craftsmanship to tourists and generating new sources of income for the surrounding villages.
For Wulan, building more success stories for women and girls in remote areas is the key to scaling impact up and outwards. The low self-esteem and the lack of parental support and peer models has prevented women from even considering having an independent life journey, for instance in deciding their own career or life path based on their own will. Martha Tilaar has been working for decades to gain that trust, and now she sees that more parents are encouraging their daughters to follow their training program.
A more holistic model requires more cross-sector and cross-stakeholder cooperation on the supply side, from investors, SAOs, to other capital providers. Through the UN Global Compact Network Indonesia, which Martha Tilaar helped establish in 2006, Wulan has connected with other like-minded enterprises to share their respective training programs and offer more options to women.
Martha Tilaar Group is without doubt the prototype of the “all women powered” enterprise. It is women-founded and women-led. Women are its end-consumers and can be found at every single stage of the enterprise’s value chain. The enterprise approach is a case study for promoting a multi-faceted approach to women empowerment. For those who wondered how a business could better take women and girls into consideration, or what kind of issues women and girls at the grassroot levels could possibly face in Indonesia, Wulan is without doubt, the most valuable source of information.
