It’s rare to find a company doubling its business yearly, even more so during the pandemic. But that’s precisely what Leala Humbert and husband Blaine Kusler are creating at Ua Body.
“It really stems from a love of Hawai'i, the florals, experiences and places here that I grew up with,” Leala says. “I think anyone who is from here or has even visited here, it resonates with you. So, I want to be sure I can capture that kind of love for the place in the fragrances.”
For those unfamiliar with Ua Body, they offer a variety of roller perfumes, lotions, skin care products, and more, all crafted with ingredients and fragrances sourced from local plants and flowers. The products are all-natural, plant-based, cruelty-free, and sold in sustainable packaging. Their products can be found in stores as far away as Okinawa, the Hiroshima Airport, the mainland, and all around the Hawaiian Islands.
“Leala has this ability with her background in food and wine, and she's taken that approach and applied it to fragrance and skincare,” Blaine says.
Ua Body—ua means rain in Hawaiian—officially launched in 2020. But its story goes much further back. Leala’s mother, Alice, was a Canadian model living in Paris in the 1970s. A restaurant manager noticed the foreigner sitting in the locals’ section and asked her to take a table in the tourist section. Ultimately, he gave her his telephone number instead. They fell in love and moved to Hawai'i.
In the islands, Alice fell in love again—this time with the local aromas. For three decades, she ran a business selling skin care products that incorporated local ingredients before passing away in 2018. “In 2019, I decided that we couldn't let her recipes or the story not continue,” Leala says.
Loyal customers had purchased Alice’s product from her booth at local farmers' markets for 15 years or more. “They always wanted to take the experience of Hawai'i home with them if they couldn’t stay here,” Leala adds.
Blaine, with a background in business development, saw the as-yet untapped potential. “The reaction was not ordinary,” he says. “At the booth, they would tell us, ‘Every year, I come back.’”
So Leala and Blaine began creating a brand that celebrated their love of Hawai'i and embodied their plant-based and sustainably packaged ideals.
“So that's the roots of where it came from,” Leala says. “And then we took it and said, OK, let's give it a facelift. Let's repackage it, you know. Let's modernize it. Let's make it cruelty-free, more natural and use more sustainable packaging. So we went for glass packaging. We got away from plastic, and then we launched in 2020. We just wanted to kind of take what she (Alice) did, hand the baton to us, and then really put in best practices and things that we felt were important to be in a business. And that's how the brand started.”
Ua Body quickly began to see business take off like an airplane—literally. They developed a business partnership with United Airlines through a third party specializing in luxury brands for the travel industry.
Now, every amenity kit United Airlines business-class passengers receive between Hawai'i and the mainland or international locations includes Ua Body products. That reaches hundreds of thousands of passengers a year.
“When we opened the store, a lot of our customers were from United Airlines,” Blaine says.
And the partnerships have continued to grow. During the pandemic, The Ritz-Carlton O‘ahu at Turtle Bay began developing a glamping—glamorous camping—site. As the pandemic wound down and occupancy began to return to normal levels, they moved the investment to their spa. Someone at the spa learned about Ua Body and invited them to create a custom fragrance.
“I did an onsite visit and met with the spa director and listened to what they were looking for,” Leala says. “So I presented them with three options, kind of three different inspirations that I took away from the resort—one being based on the crashing waves, the second one being more like your typical spa fragrance of rejuvenation, and then the third one kind of brought them together. And they went with the third one.”
With business quickly picking up, the team at Ua Body has grown to half a dozen in addition to Leala and Blaine, along with more than a dozen contractors.
“Packaging and our branding have set us apart from a lot of other brands,” Blaine says. “We leaned into colorful, expressive packaging. We saw an opportunity to have a brand from Hawai'i in the fragrance and body care space that could be ‘elevated,’ as they call it in the industry. We saw an opportunity to go to that space because there weren’t a lot of local brands in that area. Frankly, there were almost none that were from Hawai'i. We felt that if we could tie in the fragrance with the packaging and the branding that expressed Hawai'i in an honorable way, the customers would be drawn to us. And I think we did a good, conscientious job of putting all those elements together.”
While Leala and Blaine initially expected most of their business to come from creams and lotions, they were surprised by the amount of sales in their fragrance lines.
“We started out as a skincare brand, with the lotions and the creams geared towards sensitive skin, using ingredients from Hawai'i,” Blaine says. “And then we quickly found out that what customers wanted was the smell; they wanted to be drawn back to the nostalgic fragrances of Hawai'i.”
“Even if they can't get to Hawai'i, they love it, and they have such strong feelings about it that the fragrance brings it back,” Leala says. “I mean, it's almost nostalgic. You can use our products to take Hawai'i with you anywhere.”
Leala shares that the pikake jasmine fragrance is popular across mists, lotions, and roller perfumes. “But in the store, a lot of people tend to appreciate the lilikoi coconut fragrance because it's just very light and friendly,” she says. “I like the pakalana, which is more of a softer floral. I think it's really great for a home fragrance.”
While Leala and Blaine have been keeping up with customer trends, they also continue making time to innovate. The Hā Breath Collection (hā means “breath” in Hawaiian) is Ua Body’s first unisex fragrance.
“I think that's going to be our most popular fragrance going forward,” Leala says. “It's good for men and women. It's a very, I would say, a very subtle fragrance. But it's very interesting and complex in that it changes as you wear it.”
For now, Leala and Blaine are manufacturing on the lot they inherited from her mother, Alice, in Waimea.
“It's pretty convenient because over the holidays, I think I was working about 14 to 16-hour days,” Leala says. “And so it was pretty nice not to have to commute. I don't think having it close by is a bad thing. We're going to be working on stuff all day long until we go to bed. And once we wake up in the morning, we're straight back at it.”
The couple says Hawai'i is an ideal location for starting a business based on natural fragrances.
“Right before I moved back home, I was training to be a sommelier,” Leala shares. “So I was used to kind of tasting and finding and discovering these different fragrances and notes within wines. So then, I just translated that to perfumes. But what I liked about perfumes also is that you can really tell a story—like wine tells a story, fragrances can tell a story too.”
If you’re in Kona, you can visit their store on Brewery Block at 74-5606 Pawai Pl., Kailua-Kona, HI 96740. Find a list of stores around the islands that sell Ua Body products at UaBody.com.
Leala has this ability with her background in food and wine, and she's taken that approach and applied it to fragrance and skincare. —Blaine Kusler.
We felt that if we could tie in the fragrance with the packaging and the branding that expressed Hawai'i in an honorable way, the customers would be drawn to us.