Part of the series: Women Founders in Indonesia
- Women Founders in Indonesia: Nurhayati Subakat, Who Rebuilt After the Fire
- From an Informal Trade to a Registered Company: Formalising a Small Business in Indonesia
Current as at 21 July 2026.
In 1990, fire took almost everything Nurhayati Subakat had built. The factory burned. So did the office, and the family home with it. The bank loans that had paid for the business were not yet repaid. She was a pharmacist who had started making shampoo at home five years earlier, and she now faced a plain choice: continue, or stop.
Her first thought was for the people who worked for her. “If I close my company, what will become of them?” she has recalled asking herself. She kept them on. She paid their wages out of her husband’s monthly salary, and she rebuilt the factory with his savings. The company she refused to close, PT Paragon Technology and Innovation, is now the largest cosmetics company in Indonesia, and around 14,000 people work in it.
Top of her class, and no job
Subakat was born in 1950 in Padang Panjang, in the highlands of West Sumatra, one of eight children in a Minangkabau family. Her father was a merchant and a Muhammadiyah figure. Her mother ran a business of her own. She went to a girls’ Islamic boarding school, finished secondary school at the top of her year, and studied pharmacy at the Bandung Institute of Technology, where she graduated first in her class.
The distinction did not open a door. “Although I graduated from ITB at the top of my class, I was not lucky in finding a job,” she has said. She worked as a hospital pharmacist, then in quality control at the German haircare company Wella, and left after a few years. In 1985, at home, she started making a product of her own.
She began with a shampoo. “Having a pharmaceutical background, I knew that making a shampoo wasn’t all that different from making medicine,” she told The CEO Magazine. She did not begin alone. “I recruited my two housemaids as employees and we started processing it.” She sold the shampoo into salons and door to door. The work ran through the house, and the family ran with it. “Production took place on the second floor of our house and, as children, we had to help pack the bottles in the boxes and take telephone orders,” her daughter Sari Chairunnisa later told Monocle. In 1990 the company opened its first factory at Cibodas. The fire came the same year.
The bet on halal
After the rebuild, Subakat looked past the salons. The market for cosmetics was larger than the salon trade, and she moved the business toward it. In 1995 she launched Wardah, one of the first halal-certified cosmetics ranges in Indonesia, and the decision behind it was specific.
“There were no halal beauty products at the time and I wanted women to have affordable access to products that were in keeping with their faith,” she said. “All women want to look beautiful and feel fresh, and Muslim women are no different.” The concern was concrete. “Sometimes lard is used as an ingredient in cosmetics. I wanted Muslims to feel safe to use cosmetics,” she told the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Nobody was asking for it yet. “Halal cosmetics were not familiar back then. We had to build awareness among consumers and also Muslim communities in Indonesia,” she said. She sold Wardah the way she had sold the shampoo, hand to hand, including through religious school networks. She had bet on a customer the global brands had written off, and she waited years for the market to prove her right. It did. Between 2008 and 2010, a movement toward more observant Muslim life spread among Indonesian women, and a range with headscarf-wearing models met a demand no global brand had served. What she had built alone, in a market of one, became the country’s leading beauty company.
The people she calls Paragonians
Subakat gives the credit for that to the people who work for her, and she describes it as a deliberate choice rather than modesty. The company calls its staff Paragonians. “Our young employees not only know how to target our consumers, they also help create our products,” she said. When the business needed a brand for a younger generation, she followed what the young employees knew, and launched Emina in 2014. “Our research revealed that millennials and teens don’t want the same cosmetics brand as older women,” she said. Make Over followed for professionals, and Kahf for men.
She has also stepped out of the way. “I still meet with our R&D team once a week to share my experience, but I don’t make the decisions,” she said. “It’s the team that creates the ideation and the product.” Her children run the company now. Her son Harman Subakat is group chief executive, and her daughter Sari Chairunnisa, a dermatologist, is deputy chief executive and leads research. Harman describes a company that does not perform its hierarchy. “If you walked into a meeting room, you wouldn’t be able to spot the CEO simply by looking unless you’d done your research,” he told The CEO Magazine, and, of the board, “We talk about growth and impact, not profit.” The measure he uses is his mother’s. “Paragon Corp can only be as big as the dreams and capacity of our people.”
What she built, and what she gave back
Paragon now makes fourteen brands and reaches roughly a quarter of Indonesia’s beauty market, and Wardah has grown into one of the best-known cosmetics names in Southeast Asia. In 2019 the Bandung Institute of Technology gave Subakat an honorary doctorate, and the same year she received the ASEAN Business Award in the women entrepreneur category. She is widely noted for her modesty. She offered The CEO Magazine one small window on herself: “Even if I know I’m only spending the day in my home office, I put my make-up on. It just always feels good.”
When the pandemic reached Indonesia in 2020, the company committed Rp40 billion to the response. “We began distributing aid in early March 2020,” Subakat said as it started.
“To date, we have channelled aid to more than 40 referral hospitals across several provinces.”
The gift matched the principle she has stated for the way she works. “So, surely with hardship comes ease,” she told the World Intellectual Property Organization, quoting the verse her late father lived by, the same principle she reached for the night the factory burned.
The figures on women-led enterprise in Indonesia
Her scale is rare, though the ground she built on is not. Women own a large share of Indonesian enterprise. Women-owned businesses comprise 64.5 percent of the country’s micro, small and medium enterprises, and those enterprises together contribute around 60 percent of national gross domestic product, according to a 2024 survey of over 500 women entrepreneurs by Boston Consulting Group and Stellar Women. The same survey recorded that 70 percent of the women surveyed named financing and unclear regulation as a significant challenge. Digital use among these businesses is high, with 86 percent using digital platforms, 96 percent using social media and 67 percent using e-commerce marketplaces.
Where women in Indonesia can reach finance, they use it well. PNM Mekaar, a state microfinance programme that lends only to women, reached around 15 million women borrowers by the end of 2023, and its loans run at a low rate of default. A 2023 survey found that 60.85 percent of its borrowers increased their revenue after financing, and 48.35 percent increased their assets. The pattern is not local to Indonesia. A global study of microfinance found that a higher share of women borrowers is associated with lower portfolio risk and fewer write-offs, which is to say that women, on the whole, repay.
Evidence from outside Indonesia points the same way on performance. A 2018 study by Boston Consulting Group and the MassChallenge accelerator reviewed five years of data from its cohort, of which around 42 percent had at least one female founder. Businesses founded or co-founded by women generated 78 cents of revenue for each dollar of funding, against 31 cents for those founded by men. Those women-led businesses raised an average of USD 935,000, against USD 2.1 million for the men-led businesses, and produced higher cumulative revenue over the five years, USD 730,000 against USD 662,000. This finding describes a single accelerator cohort rather than the whole market, and it predates the current period, so we present it as a 2018 result rather than a rule for every business.
The financing that women name as their obstacle is a gap on the lenders’ side as much as the founders’. The International Finance Corporation put the credit gap for women-owned businesses in Indonesia at 21.2 billion US dollars in 2023, in a country where micro, small and medium enterprises account for 97 percent of the workforce. That gap measures unmet demand from creditworthy businesses.
The collaborative pattern, and what it does not replace
Research on leadership style qualifies the common idea that women lead differently. A meta-analysis by Eagly and Johnson found that women, on average, adopt a more participative and democratic approach than men, and a less directive one, while most other differences in leadership style were small. Gender alone does not determine how a founder leads, and a participative tendency is an average across many people rather than a rule for any individual.
What the record does show is that mixed leadership performs. McKinsey has tracked the link across a decade, and in its 2023 study companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 39 percent more likely to outperform their peers financially, up from 25 percent in 2020. The relationship is a correlation rather than a proven cause, so it is fairer to say that diverse leadership accompanies strong performance than to say it produces it.
A participative, people-centred approach describes how several of the founders in this series built their teams, and it describes how we work with clients. A collaborative culture does not remove the need for formal structure. An enterprise run on trust among its people still requires the legal architecture that lets an outsider, a bank or an auditor, verify who owns it and how it is governed.
From informal to investable
The distance between a home business and a fundable company is structural. A business trading informally has no separate legal person, no registered ownership and no orderly accounts to present. A lender or an investor assessing that business examines the registered entity, the ownership recorded on the share register, the licensing and the financial records, and an informal trader can supply none of these. Formalisation supplies each of these, beginning with registration as a Perseroan Terbatas (PT, limited liability company), which creates a legal person separate from the founder, able to borrow and own property in its own name. A Nomor Induk Berusaha (NIB, business identification number), issued through the Online Single Submission (OSS) system, records the business and its licensing. The share register required by Article 48 of the Company Law records who owns the company. Together these let a bank or an investor read the business the same way its owner does. The founders profiled through this series each operate a formal entity of this kind, Paragon among them as a registered PT.
What this series examines
Each instalment profiles a founder or two, then sets out one structural or compliance lesson the reader can apply. The instalments that follow examine the journey from an informal trade to a registered company; the compliant route for a foreign woman building a business in Indonesia, and why a nominee arrangement is illegal and unenforceable; the ownership of shares and assets in a woman’s own name under Indonesia’s marital-property rules; the vehicle a mission-driven venture needs, a foundation or a company; and the ownership and compliance that make a woman-led business one a lender or an investor can fund.
The founders featured include Indonesian nationals and foreign nationals operating in Indonesia, and one instalment profiles our own founder among them.
The dream, and the part TraceWorthy plays
Subakat is one founder, and this series will profile others, Indonesian and foreign, who built enterprises in Indonesia. What we look for in each of them is not gender. It is the specific unlikely thing she did, and the people she did it with. A pharmacist who could not find a job made shampoo with her two housemaids, rebuilt from a fire rather than lay anyone off, and built the largest cosmetics company in the country by trusting the young people who worked for her.
She wanted women to have affordable products that were in keeping with their faith and safe to use.
People build structure because they have to, not because they want to. The dream is the part that lights a founder up, and the structure is the part she would give to someone else if she could.
That is the space TraceWorthy exists to fill. Our founder, Tracy Wilkinson, listens first, for the dream a founder has and for the one she has not yet said aloud, and she gives it form and the courage to pursue it. Sometimes that means telling a hard truth early, to spare a client an avoidable mistake. Then the team she built, Indonesian lawyers, accountants, tax specialists and compliance professionals trained to a standard set against international practice, takes on everything the dream demands and the founder never wanted: the structure, the licenses, the certifications, the models, the negotiations, the land, and the problems that grow complicated.
She does what she loves. We look after the rest.
If you have an idea you have not yet said out loud, we would like to hear it.
Tell us about the business you dream of.
This article is general information current as at 21 July 2026. Company, tax, and investment rules change, and the position for any business depends on its own facts, so obtain advice for your own situation before you act. It is not legal, tax, or financial advice, and it does not create an advisory relationship or reach any conclusion on a particular reader’s position.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Paragon, and what does the company do?
Nurhayati Subakat began the business now registered as PT Paragon Technology and Innovation from her home in 1985, and it is today the largest cosmetics company in Indonesia. It launched Wardah in 1995 as one of the earliest halal-certified cosmetics ranges in the country, and its brands include Wardah, Make Over, Emina and Putri. The company employs around 14,000 people, and Subakat’s children now run it as a registered Perseroan Terbatas.
What share of Indonesian businesses are owned by women?
Women-owned businesses comprise 64.5 percent of Indonesia’s micro, small and medium enterprises, according to a 2024 survey of over 500 women entrepreneurs by Boston Consulting Group and Stellar Women. Those enterprises together contribute around 60 percent of national gross domestic product. The same survey recorded that 70 percent of the women surveyed named financing and unclear regulation as a significant challenge.
Do women-led businesses perform well against the funding they raise?
A 2018 study by Boston Consulting Group and the MassChallenge accelerator found that businesses founded or co-founded by women generated 78 cents of revenue for each dollar of funding, against 31 cents for those founded by men, while raising a lower average sum than men-founded businesses. That finding describes one accelerator cohort over five years rather than the whole market, and it predates the current period, so it is a 2018 result rather than a present-day rule.
What does it take to make a small business in Indonesia fundable?
A lender or an investor assesses a registered entity, the ownership recorded on the share register, the licensing and the financial records. An informal trade has none of these. Registration as a Perseroan Terbatas creates a legal person separate from the founder, a Nomor Induk Berusaha issued through the Online Single Submission system records the business and its licensing, and the share register required by Article 48 of the Company Law records the ownership. Together these let an outsider assess the business.
Does TraceWorthy advise only foreign investors?
We advise Indonesian founders and foreign founders operating in Indonesia. This series profiles both, from an Indonesian national who built a national company to foreign nationals who built enterprises here. Our structuring work covers the entity, the ownership, the governance and the compliance a growing business needs, whichever side of that description a founder is on.