Decisions that cost margin before they earned trust

Holding the Helaimas sachet at nine millilitres when costs rose

In the first half of 2022 the cost of palm-derived surfactants, fragrance and laminate film for Helaimas rose by 27 per cent. In Indonesia the brand sold 61 per cent of its volume as 9 ml shampoo sachets at Rp1,000, and the sachet's contribution margin had fallen from 31 to 14 per cent. Two large competitors had already cut their fills at an unchanged price. Helaimas was 38 per cent of group revenue, and this sachet was its largest single product.

Our chief financial officer, Melvin Gan Kok Leong, and our Indonesian general manager, Bambang Wirawardhana, proposed cutting the fill to 7.5 ml at the same Rp1,000. It would have restored most of the margin within a quarter and almost nobody would have noticed, which was my objection. At 9 ml the sachet already cost 27 per cent more per millilitre than our 170 ml family bottle; at 7.5 ml it would have cost 52 per cent more, paid by the shoppers least able to afford a bottle.

I proposed keeping 9 ml, raising the family bottle's price by 6 per cent, retiring 17 slow-selling variants and cutting S$5.2 million of Embunsari television, with a rule that the sachet's price per millilitre should not exceed the bottle's by more than 30 per cent. Melvin argued, fairly, that I was asking bottle buyers and another brand to pay for a choice made on behalf of sachet buyers. The board approved my plan for twelve months, with a review at six.

Helaimas gross margin fell 3.4 percentage points in 2022, about S$9.6 million less gross profit than the shrink plan would have produced, and bottle volumes fell 6 per cent. Helaimas's value share of Indonesian general trade rose from 11.2 per cent in 2021 to 13.4 per cent by the end of 2023, and a thinner laminate introduced in 2024 restored the sachet's contribution margin to 26 per cent.

The sachet premium now appears for every brand and market in the quarterly board pack, beside gross margin.

I would do two things differently. I would have briefed distributors earlier, before they absorbed shoppers' complaints about competitors' smaller sachets. And I would have set separate caps for markets where sachet and bottle buyers shop in different stores; a single regional number was easier to defend than to apply.

Withdrawing a recyclable claim our sachets had not earned

In early 2023 our packaging team moved Helaimas sachets from a multi-layer laminate to a single-polymer structure that recyclers can process, at a cost of S$4.3 million in tooling and line changes at Pasuruan and Nilai. Our agency produced a S$2.6 million campaign for Indonesia and the Philippines built on the line that the sachet was now recyclable, and our Indonesian general manager and head of packaging development supported it, not least because a competitor was already making the claim.

I stopped the campaign four weeks before launch. In the cities where it would run, almost nobody collected used sachets; in our field audit of 1,200 households in Surabaya and Sidoarjo, fewer than 3 per cent reached any collector. The material could be recycled. The shopper's sachet, in practice, would not be. A claim relying on infrastructure the shopper did not have seemed to me misleading in spirit, even where its wording could be defended.

The trade-off was immediate: we wrote off S$1.4 million of finished advertising, delayed the relaunch by a quarter and sent salespeople into shops without a story to match the competitor's. Bambang Wirawardhana told me, with some justice, that I had given away the brand's best news. We printed a factual statement on the back of the pack, that the sachet is made from one type of plastic, and redirected S$1.1 million a year to collection: 58 waste banks in Surabaya and Sidoarjo are paid for each kilogram of flexible packaging of any brand, and we fund sorting and transport to a recycler in Gresik.

By June 2026 the programme had collected 640 tonnes, more than three times the weight of Helaimas sachets we sold into the two cities over the same period. The tonnage, its cost and the recycler's receipts go to the board's Sustainability Committee twice a year. In 2025 the competitor removed its recyclability claim without announcement. Our rule for environmental claims changed for good: we describe what has been measured and has happened, never a property that depends on someone else's infrastructure.

I would do two things differently. I would have involved sales before cancelling, with a plain script for answering the competitor. And I would have fixed the programme's measures before launch, not in its second year, when we found that early tonnage had been weighed inconsistently.

Pausing live selling for three weeks to fix what hosts were saying

By early 2024 live selling was Embunsari's fastest-growing channel. Fifty-eight contracted creators and fourteen employed hosts broadcast about 1,300 hours a month on marketplaces and a short-video app in Indonesia and Malaysia, producing 41 per cent of Embunsari's online revenue. Returns on live orders were 12.1 per cent, almost twice the rate on ordinary marketplace orders, and complaints quoted promises we had never made.

Our marketing compliance team reviewed 60 recorded sessions. Unapproved claims appeared in 27: that a serum would fade dark spots in seven days, that a cream was safe in pregnancy, that dermatologists had endorsed a range, that halal meant chemical-free. In 19 of the 44 creator sessions the paid relationship was not disclosed, or only in a caption few viewers would see.

Our head of e-commerce, Kezia Purwatanaya, argued for retraining hosts while sessions continued: a pause would hand our time slots to competitors, and marketplace ranking penalises an inactive shop. Her concerns were well founded. I paused all contracted-creator sessions for three weeks, keeping employed hosts on a reduced schedule, because I could not defend paying for another hour of claims we knew to be unsupported.

In those weeks we wrote a claims card of 41 approved statements and 16 prohibited ones, made disclosure a contract term, spoken in the first minute and shown on screen throughout, trained all 72 hosts and agreed that no fee would be paid for a session containing an unapproved claim. A compliance reviewer now watches a sample of sessions live and can message a host mid-broadcast.

The cost was real. Embunsari's online revenue fell 24 per cent that month and by about S$1.6 million across the quarter, 13 creators declined the new contract, and our marketplace rankings took two months to recover. By the end of 2024 returns on live orders had fallen to 6.9 per cent, and claim-related complaints from 31 to 9 per 10,000 orders. Live revenue in 2025 was 18 per cent above its level before the pause, and the Audit and Risk Committee now reviews live-selling controls twice a year.

I would write the claims card before scaling the hours, not after. I would also pay employed hosts better from the start: they made fewer errors, and we lost two of the best to competitors during the pause.

Moving Embunsari's source language from English to Bahasa Indonesia

When I joined Lumarind in 2019, Embunsari's campaigns were written in English by an agency in Singapore that had served the company for eleven years, then translated for each market. Indonesia produced 46 per cent of the brand's sales. Our research in Jakarta and Surabaya kept returning the same verdict on the advertising: competent, attractive and plainly translated. Embunsari's share of Indonesian modern-trade skin care had been flat at about 6 per cent for three years, while local brands written in everyday Indonesian grew around us.

In 2020 I proposed making Bahasa Indonesia the brand's source language: a Jakarta agency would lead creative work, Malay copy would be written separately in Kuala Lumpur, and English would become an adaptation for Singapore. Our group chief executive, Raymond Chua Soon Heng, worried about losing central control and paying two agencies. Our Malaysian general manager, Nurul Ain Zakaria, feared that Malaysia would receive Indonesian advertising with a few words swapped, and reminded the executive committee that ordinary Indonesian words can read very differently in Malaysia. Both concerns were legitimate.

We made the change in stages. The Singapore agency kept Teduhwangi for a transition year, and Malaysia received its own writers and a veto over any line it would run. The move cost S$1.9 million in transition fees and duplicated work, and the relaunch slipped from the first to the second quarter of 2021. We also ended a relationship that had served the founder's family well, which our executive chairman felt keenly.

In Indonesia the relaunch worked. Embunsari's modern-trade share rose from 6.1 to 8.4 per cent by 2023, and brand revenue grew from S$171 million in 2020 to S$252 million in 2025. Malaysian revenue grew more slowly, but without the complaints about tone that had followed earlier campaigns. The Philippines was the failure. The central idea depended on an Indonesian pun about morning dew that could not be carried into Filipino, and Embunsari's Philippine sales were flat in 2021.

What changed is that each of our brands now has a brief that fixes the idea, the evidence and the forbidden claims, while the lines belong to each language.

I would develop an idea in two languages from the beginning, Indonesian and Filipino, and test it in both before approving either. I let our largest market judge an idea on behalf of all of them.