Sariayu Brand Guidelines: Martha Tilaar’s 1977 Jakarta Beauty Brand and Its Yearly Colour Story

From salon chair to cosmetics.

Sariayu grew out of a Jakarta beauty salon. Martha Tilaar opened her business in 1970 with a salon at her parents’ home in Menteng, Central Jakarta, The Jakarta Post reported in October 2026. detikFinance, citing the group’s website in November 2022, described that first salon as a room of four by six metres in the family garage, and said she had earlier studied at the Academy of Beauty Culture in Bloomington, Indiana, while living in the United States.

In 1972 she opened a second salon, Martha Griya Salon, also in Menteng. The group’s own timeline says it was there that its herbal-based beauty treatments began, and The Jakarta Post describes the same salon as the place where she started bringing herbal treatments into her services.

The products came five years later. In 1977 she founded PT Martina Berto with two business partners, Bernard Pranata and Theresia Harsini Setiady, whom The Jakarta Post describes as a founder of the Kalbe Group; Indonesian Wikipedia connects that partnership with the drug maker Kalbe Farma and dates the company’s incorporation to 1 June 1977. The company introduced Sariayu as a beauty and modern herbal-medicine brand, the Post reported, and the group’s timeline places the brand’s launch in the same year.

Factories, brands and a listing.

Martina Berto built its first factory in the Pulogadung industrial estate in East Jakarta in 1981; Indonesian Wikipedia dates it to 22 December that year. In 1983, the group says, PT Sari Ayu Indonesia, now PT SAI Indonesia, was set up to distribute the company’s cosmetics. Indonesian Wikipedia says the company now runs three factory units, in Pulogadung and Cibarusah, and that a plant at Cibarusah was completed in 2015.

The company widened its range from the late 1980s. The Jakarta Post lists the brands that followed Sariayu, including Biokos, Caring Colours and Belia; Indonesian Wikipedia dates those launches to between 1988 and 1994 and records the purchase of three cosmetics manufacturers, among them PT Cedefindo, between 1993 and 1995. It also says that from 2000 the brands were split into two groups: those licensed from Martha Tilaar, such as Sariayu and Biokos, and those owned outright by the company. The group’s timeline adds Professional Artist Cosmetics, Dewi Sri Spa and Jamu Garden among brands created between 2001 and 2009, and Indonesian Wikipedia says the company began opening Martha Tilaar Shop outlets outside Indonesia in 2010 and bought the Rudy Hadisuwarno brand for hair care in 2016.

Ownership changed in 1999. The group’s timeline says Martha Tilaar Group bought the part of Martina Berto held by the Kalbe Group, bringing the company fully under its management; detikFinance dated the formation of the Martha Tilaar Group to the same year. In 2011 the company became PT Martina Berto Tbk, a public company that trades on the Indonesia Stock Exchange under the code MBTO, according to Indonesian Wikipedia, which gives PT Marthana Megayahu Inti as its main shareholder, citing the 2022 annual report. The group also includes PT Cedefindo, which provides manufacturing and contract production, and PT Martha Beauty Gallery, which runs the Puspita Martha International School for beauty education, The Jakarta Post reported. detikFinance listed further group companies in 2022, among them PT Cantika Puspa Pesona for spa and salon services and PT SAI Indonesia for distribution and logistics.

Indonesian beauty and jamu.

Indonesian beauty and modest-fashion brands tend to present themselves through people, packaging and the places they sell, and only occasionally through a published identity manual. Logos and colour codes are rarely documented in the press, so a design reading has to rest on what companies show in public: the pack, the campaign, the ambassador and the corporate page that names founders and owners.

Halal statements are part of that picture, but companies publish them in different ways. Liputan6 reported in 2022 that Wardah received a halal certificate from the Majelis Ulama Indonesia in 1999, while Wardah’s founder told The Jakarta Post in 2019 that the brand did not put its certificates at the centre of its advertising. A marketing analyst quoted by the same paper linked the growth of halal cosmetics to the spread of the hijab as everyday fashion from around 2009, saying that fashion and cosmetics moved together.

Campaigns lean on familiar faces. Singers, racing drivers and other public figures appear as named ambassadors in dated launches, from a 2014 Wardah event in Jakarta reported by Fimela to a 2026 lip campaign shot in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, covered by Marketing-Interactive. Marketplace launches matter as much as shops: Monocle reported in 2025 that Paragon Corp sells through livestreams on TikTok, Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia, and Sinar Harian reported that Emina’s 2022 Malaysian launch named Shopee, TikTok Shop and Watsons as its outlets.

Group ownership shapes the field. Paragon Corp, founded in 1985 and renamed in 2011, runs a family of brands for different ages and budgets, and older houses with roots in the jamu tradition sit alongside it with their own founders and corporate histories. Each guide in this series describes those owners plainly, dates every ambassador and launch, and treats colour and type as our own unofficial interpretation.

A colour collection every year.

Sariayu’s clearest design habit is its yearly colour collection. In June 2025 Popmama reported that Sariayu’s Color Trend 2025 collection, called Dear Mahameru, was the 38th in an annual series that began in 1987. It took its theme from the Bromo-Tengger-Semeru area of East Java and the view of Mahameru, and comprised tinted lip oils, matte lip stains, blushes and eye shades, with eye-shade sets named Kadhaton, Martyapada and Swargaloka.

The habit is long-standing. In December 2014 Beautynesia wrote that Sariayu brings out a new make-up colour trend every year, and described the brand as built on a concept of Eastern beauty that Martha Tilaar called “Rupasampat Wahyabiantara,” pairing outward and inner beauty. In October 2016 the same site reported that the 2016 collection, Trend Warna Krakatau, had been introduced at the end of 2015, and that its Duo Lip Color combined a matte and a glossy lip cream in a single pack.

Its skin-care side is organised in named series. In September 2017 Kontan reported that Martina Berto was preparing a new Sariayu range, Econature Nutreage, for the end of that year, and quoted a Sariayu product manager describing facial care as a growing mass-market category that the company meant to reach through new products and wide distribution, so that its ranges could be found easily in shops.

The brand name stays tied to its founder. Sariayu is sold as Sariayu Martha Tilaar, and the company’s other mass-market labels, Biokos and Caring Colours among them, also carry the Martha Tilaar name, according to Indonesian Wikipedia.

For a design guide, Sariayu shows how an annual colour story drawn from Indonesian places can give a long-running beauty brand a fresh visual theme each year. Compare Mustika Ratu, another Jakarta company with roots in jamu, and Make Over, an Indonesian make-up brand. For this guide we use a terracotta and a deep leaf green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sariayu’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.