Budi Thomas didn’t plan to be in beauty.
He was running a social media and graphic design agency. Then an accessories brand, necklaces, earrings, rings. Then his wife walked past a supplier building in Guangzhou and asked to go inside.
On that one afternoon, they bought their first product: eyelid tape. A sticker you put on your eyelid to make your eyes look bigger. From there, they entered beauty tools. From tools, cosmetics. From cosmetics, a brand that would eventually be the only Indonesian company that Disney flew to their US headquarters as a case study in what an indie brand from a developing country could produce.
That’s Jacquelle. And the story of how it got there is not what most people expect.
The Disney Audition Nobody Was Ready For
In 2020, Disney approached a handful of Indonesian indie beauty brands with what Budi calls a beauty contest. Not a competition in the entertainment sense, a rigorous qualification process. Submit a proposal. Define the product pipeline. Explain the timeline. Justify the quality standards. Then wait for approval from Singapore. Then from the US.
Jacquelle had never done IP licensing before.
“Without having any experience, we were really forecasting based on what we feel we can do,” Budi told us. “And we tried, because of the background of the agency, I believe we could create products that Disney would accept.”
They got through. Then they had to produce. And Disney approves everything, every poster, every packaging design, every social media post, every product finish. Nothing ships until every layer clears.
“When we really had the products, they were very impressed with our quality.”
Two years in a row, Disney gave Jacquelle a newcomer award. Then they flew the team to headquarters in Burbank. Not for a meeting, as a case study. Disney wanted to show other markets, in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, that a small indie brand from Indonesia, “so-called as Third World countries,” Budi notes without bitterness, had produced at a level most established brands couldn’t match.
The approvals got easier after that. Not because Disney relaxed its standards. Because Jacquelle had built a track record of exceeding them.
What You’re Actually Buying When You License an IP
Here’s where most people misread the Jacquelle story.
The instinct is to frame it as a brand story, an Indonesian company punching above its weight by borrowing the credibility of Disney, Sanrio, SpyX Family. That framing is wrong. It misses what Budi actually figured out.
“What am I really buying? The power for Jacquelle to compete in the market is having a different angle, a different tool to penetrate.”
IPs, in his model, are not brand endorsements. They’re distribution keys. Every IP unlocks a community, a specific group of people who care deeply about that character, that world, that story, and most of those communities have never had a beauty brand show up for them.
The SpyX Family collaboration is the clearest example. SpyX was top three on Netflix across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. The Jacquelle team identified it early. But the unlock wasn’t the Netflix rankings, it was who was watching. Cosplayers. Heavy makeup users. A community that was already deeply engaged with the aesthetic of the character, already spending on the culture around it, and had never been approached by a beauty brand.
“No makeup brand was approaching them.”
Jacquelle didn’t just launch a SpyX Family product. They invited cosplayers to a mall event during COVID, when gathering restrictions capped attendance at 50 to 100 people. Hundreds came. The security was shocked. The atrium filled.
That wasn’t a marketing stunt. It was what happens when you find a community that has been ignored and show up for them first.
And because Jacquelle delivered on SpyX Family, Disney came back with more characters. Then Sanrio. Then Devil Wears Prada, a 25-year-old IP that nobody expected to still carry that kind of heat, but whose audience turned out to be exactly the mature, working-women demographic that Jacquelle had been trying to reach. Dior and Prada launched Devil Wears Prada collaborations in LA, New York, and Shanghai. Jacquelle did it in Jakarta, and was the only beauty brand in Asia on that list.
“In IP industry,” Budi says, “if you’re well with A, you’re going to be approached with B and C and D.”
The compounding is real. But it doesn’t start with a licensing strategy. It starts with a product quality standard that earns the trust of partners you want to keep.
The Influencer System That Came From Having No Money
Before any of the IP work, before Disney, before the mall filled with cosplayers, Jacquelle built a different kind of advantage. One that came directly from financial constraint.
“It’s coming from survival mode.”
Other brands were spending heavily on KOLs and influencer endorsements. Jacquelle couldn’t. So instead of competing for the same pool of influencers at inflated prices, they asked a different question: who hasn’t been approached yet?
The answer was musicians, mathematicians, creators in categories no beauty brand had ever entered. Not because Jacquelle had a sophisticated targeting framework, because those categories were cheaper. The collaboration fees hadn’t been bid up. The audiences were untapped. And the novelty of a beauty brand appearing in a context where beauty brands never appeared was, itself, part of the hook.
But the bigger innovation wasn’t the category selection. It was what Jacquelle did with the product itself.
Most influencer collaborations happen on the box. Sometimes on a sticker applied to existing packaging. Jacquelle puts the influencer’s name on the product, the lipstick, the eyeshadow, the object itself. The thing that ends up on someone’s dressing table every morning and stays there for months.
“The endorser really has to love the product. Not only believe, but even use their own products. Because this is considered as their products, because they got the name on it.”
When your name is on the product, you don’t post about it because you’re contractually obligated to. You post about it because it’s yours. That authenticity is the thing audiences recognize and respond to, even when they can’t articulate why. And it’s the thing that separates a campaign that generates awareness from a partnership that generates belief.
Jacquelle still does proper contracts. Non-negotiable. But the contract isn’t the relationship. “Know them in person,” Budi says. “That’s the most effective one.”
The Middle Market Squeeze, and Why It’s an Advantage
Indonesia’s beauty market is getting compressed from both ends.
Premium international brands, Japanese, European, Korean, own the top. Chinese brands are flooding the low end with the cheapest products they can produce. Jacquelle sits in the middle, and Budi is clear-eyed about what that means.
“Being the middle one is always compressed, always stuck in the middle.”
The naive response to that pressure is to pick a side, go cheap to compete on volume, or go premium to escape the price war. Jacquelle did neither. Instead, they built a range wide enough to accommodate multiple buyer types while maintaining a quality standard that makes the cheap alternatives look exactly like what they are.
Products from Rp39,000 to over Rp300,000. The SPG working the mall counter can buy it. The marketing director who shops at the same mall can buy it. The perception gap between what it looks like and what it costs is not a branding problem, it’s an asset.
“The challenge will be because of the perception. Not everyone dares to buy our products even before they see the price. They have the perception: this is too expensive.”
But that perception gap is also what made international buyers at a beauty expo in Bologna, Italy, assume Jacquelle wasn’t Indonesian. When Budi walked the floor at Cosmoprof and looked at the European, Middle Eastern, Turkish, and American brands around him, he realized Jacquelle wasn’t behind them. The assessment he keeps hearing from the people he meets: “Jacquelle is not designed for the Indonesian market. You designed it for international.”
They haven’t gone global yet. The paperwork, each SKU certified separately, each country with different regulations, is the current constraint. Singapore and Malaysia are next. But the product is ready. The market is ready. The only thing left is the process.
The Only Strategy That Survives
One of the things that makes Budi unusual among the founders we talk to is how openly he holds his own frameworks.
He doesn’t have a fixed strategy. He says it directly, without apology. The core team gets together, brainstorms, looks for signals from every level of the organization, the intern, the admin, the new hire. Then they decide. Then the market changes and they decide again.
Lazada was dominant. Then Shopee. Then TikTok Shop. Live streaming was massive, then it wasn’t. Affiliate took over from live. Threads is performing in Indonesia now, which surprised even Budi, he’d written off long-form reading as a dead habit.
“Stop a while, look at the wind direction, and then decide where to go.”
That’s the whole philosophy. Not a formula. Not a playbook. A posture, the willingness to hold plans loosely enough to change them when the market does.
For a seven-person marketing team running 360-degree campaigns across paid, affiliate, influencer, offline, and partnerships simultaneously, that posture isn’t just philosophical. It’s operational. They can move because the team is small enough to move. The leanness isn’t a constraint. It’s the point.
The Product Standard That Doesn’t Move
Through everything, the IPs, the influencers, the market positioning, the expansion plans, one thing in Budi’s model is non-negotiable.
“The level of quality of the product should be at the level that you, me, myself want to use it, want to have it. If the product is not good, I wouldn’t do that. If the finishing is not good, the packaging is not good, I wouldn’t do that.”
This isn’t a brand values statement. It’s a filter. Every product that goes to market has to pass the test of whether Budi would confidently hand it to someone and say: you should have this. If it doesn’t pass, it doesn’t go out. Regardless of the IP, regardless of the influencer, regardless of the launch window.
That standard is why Disney’s approval process got faster. Not because Jacquelle got better at navigating the system, because Disney learned that what Jacquelle submitted was what Jacquelle would produce. No gap between proposal and delivery.
Marketing, Budi says, is ultimately the game in beauty. Obviously. The brands that win are the ones who understand distribution, channel fit, community, timing.
But marketing only compounds on a product that earns repeat purchase. You can get someone to try something once with a great campaign. You can’t get them to come back, or to defend the brand in comments when a blog forgets to include it, without the product actually being good.
What Founders Should Take From This
Jacquelle’s story is easier to misread than to read correctly.
The surface version is: Indonesian brand gets Disney IP, brand grows. The actual story is more useful and more transferable than that.
Constraint is a design input. Having no budget to compete for mainstream influencers forced Jacquelle to find categories nobody had priced yet. That forced precision became a repeatable competitive advantage long after the financial constraint eased.
The channel is not the strategy, the community is. Every IP, every influencer, every platform Jacquelle touches is a means to the same end: finding a specific group of people who have been ignored and showing up for them first. The channel changes. That logic doesn’t.
Quality is what makes everything else compound. The influencer system works because the product is good enough that influencers actually want their name on it. The IP system works because Disney trusts Jacquelle to deliver. The international expansion is possible because the product already competes at that level. None of it works without the product at the centre.
And adaptability isn’t a strategy, it’s the precondition for having one. The brands that built rigid systems around a single channel are the ones that struggle when the channel shifts. The brands that stayed loose enough to move are the ones that find the next channel before everyone else gets there.
Budi Thomas started with an accessories brand and a wife who wanted to see inside a building in Guangzhou. A decade later, Disney flew him to Burbank.
The gap between those two moments isn’t luck. It’s a decade of delivering at a quality standard high enough that the right people keep coming back, with more opportunities, more IPs, more doors.
That’s the system. And it’s available to anyone willing to build it the same way.
Budi Thomas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Jacquelle, Indonesia’s leading indie beauty brand. This article is based on a conversation recorded for the GTMLab Founder Playbook series.
