Chrisanti Indiana was 22 when she flew home to Indonesia in 2014 after her studies in Sydney. She did not come back to take a job. She came back with a complaint.
The complaint was simple, and she has put it in her own words: she found it very difficult to find original and safe products online. In Indonesia's beauty market, demand was loud and supply was murky. Plenty of sellers offered serums and lipsticks without approval from the food and drug agency BPOM, and nobody could tell the real from the fake until it touched their skin.
What nobody tells you is that the first fight was with the brands, not the customers.
She joined Christopher Madiam and John Rasjid, who had spotted the same hole. Madiam later said there was high demand for beauty products but not enough authentic supply. Their plan was dull to describe and hard to do: sell only genuine goods, buy directly from brands and authorised distributors, and let customers write reviews.
The company started in a small shophouse. Sociolla went online in 2015, and East Ventures wrote the first cheque that year.
What nobody tells you is that the first fight was with the brands, not the customers. Labels were wary of the internet because it was full of resellers who cut prices without permission. Indiana had to persuade them that Sociolla was a different kind of seller, one that would promote them. At the same time, shoppers kept drifting to cheaper marketplaces. Winning them back needed more than a catalogue, so the founders built a content arm and a community around reviews. In 2017 they launched SOCO.id and the SOCOBOX subscription, and in 2018 the SOCO Beauty app.
Money followed. A US$12m round led by EV Growth arrived in May 2018, and Temasek and L Catterton backed a round of about US$60m in 2022. By 2020 the group estimated about 30 million users across its units. In 2025 it counted 100 stores for its tenth anniversary, and its CEO said 2024 revenue had grown around 50%.
Indiana has been frank about being young. She says it gave her energy and a willingness to take risks, and also less experience. She leans on mentors, and warns that founders who do not learn fast get passed by bigger companies.
The takeaway is in the order of her own sentence. Trust came first, scale second. A founder who begins with a problem she personally could not solve as a customer has already done her market research.