How ex-Halodoc CMO Felicia Kawilarang pitches wellness through storytelling

What lessons can a marketer carry into creating their own brand? Felicia Kawilarang, who grew Halodoc’s marketing from the ground up, is betting that compelling storytelling - not hard selling - is the real engine of brand growth. Her leap from CMO to founder with new wellness label Ryse and Shyne reflects a marketer’s belief that narrative can outlast the pitch.

After nearly seven years shaping Halodoc’s brand voice and scaling its marketing engine, Kawilarang had a light-bulb moment that changed her course. “I never really wanted to be a founder,” she said in an interview with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE. “I knew what the pressure was… it wasn’t always a dream. But after my divorce, I found that I’m really passionate about women empowerment, especially in terms of overall wellness - mental, physical and spiritual. That’s the legacy that I want to make.”

That vision became the foundation for Ryse and Shyne, which Kawilarang is careful to frame as more than an activewear line. She describes it as a community-first wellness brand designed to create a safe space for women to feel “safe and seen in their own bodies.”

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From scaling healthtech to crafting a movement

At Halodoc, Kawilarang navigated the complexities of scaling a marketing team from zero to over a hundred, steering campaigns through the high-pressure peak of COVID-19. Those years shaped her understanding of early-stage talent needs.

“In the beginning of a business, you need people who can wear many hats… fast thinkers, fast movers, and flexible,” she explained. “In 2016 and 2017 at Halodoc, we sometimes hired people with prestigious consulting backgrounds, but in a startup’s early days, roles change so quickly that they struggled. That’s a big learning I’ve brought into Ryse and Shyne.”

The parallels between Kawilarang’s former life as CMO and her current role as founder are striking. At Ryse and Shyne, she has built the brand’s core strategy around branding and messaging, placing these at the heart of the business rather than letting product lead the way. The focus, she said, is on movement - creating a female-led platform rooted in body confidence, safety, and empowerment.

Even after leaving Halodoc two years ago, Kawilarang didn’t step away from the industry entirely, taking on a role as growth advisor at M&C Saatchi Performance. Yet she admits that founding a brand comes with an entirely different set of challenges. Her time at Halodoc, especially in building and leading teams, has been instrumental in navigating this new terrain.

“A lot of my marketing skills carry over into being a founder - it doesn’t feel like I’ve changed much, nor that I’m suddenly more focused on product or tech,” she said. “What we want to focus on is movement, about female-led platforms, being safe in your body, women empowerment - it’s all messaging-based.”

A rejection of trend-chasing

In an industry where microtrends can dictate entire product cycles, Kawilarang takes a deliberate stance: “It’s important that we don’t follow trends. I like to create trends.” That conviction echoes Halodoc’s early positioning, when the telemedicine category was nascent in Indonesia and there was no playbook to copy.

Founded in 2016, Halodoc was a pioneering healthtech platform in Indonesia, introducing online consultations and medicine delivery at a time when the category was virtually unheard of. Kawilarang, alongside founder and CEO Jonathan Sudharta, forged a path through unmarked territory, writing the rules as they advanced.

For Ryse and Shyne, that means community building before commerce. The brand has launched monthly offline events - pilates classes, journaling sessions, pop-ups - that aim to deepen human connections in a post-COVID landscape where in-person engagement has regained cultural currency.

Storytelling also sits at the heart of her content marketing playbook, often leaning into personal narratives around mental health, anxiety, body image, and wellness habits. “We talk about things Indonesians don’t really talk about,” she said, pointing to the importance of educational, emotionally resonant content.

During her time at Halodoc, Kawilarang steered the company not only through its formative years but also at its height during the COVID-19 pandemic, when demand for telemedicine surged overnight. With no clear roadmap in a national and global crisis, she led a remote team through rapid execution, fully pivoting to digital operations while keeping morale high amid illness, uncertainty, and chaos.

As the pandemic eased, she embraced the growing appeal of offline community gatherings - seeing the offline touch as “a lot more important” for people to connect with and understand her wellness brand.

Balancing personal story and brand autonomy

While the brand’s origins are rooted in Kawilarang’s personal journey, and she carries a notable social media following, she is intentional about keeping her public persona separate from Ryse and Shyne’s long-term identity. “I don’t want the brand to be me or me to be the brand… slowly, as we are building, we want it to stand on its own.”

That independence extends to funding strategy. The company is currently bootstrapped with no plans for near-term fundraising. “My fear of funding is that… we don’t want external forces to be changing who we are as a brand.” The same caution applies to influencer marketing. Kawilarang argues it no longer works as well as it once did: “Consumers are a lot smarter now. Brands have to own a specific value or story that people genuinely want to represent.”

For now, her focus is on refining the brand’s message and cultivating a community of women aged 25 to 35 from the mid-to-high-end market, whom she believes will deeply connect with Ryse and Shyne’s values. Kawilarang cites brands such as Goop as inspiration, admiring how they prioritise storytelling and the brand’s essence. “People are buying into the essence and storytelling of the brand instead of buying the product itself.”

Kawilarang’s shift from CMO to founder underscores a larger truth for brand builders: the same skills that power market-leading campaigns can also forge meaningful brands, so long as they are anchored in values that truly resonate.

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