K eith decided to create his own perfumes after coming across alcohol-free perfumes in a Malaysian perfume shop in 2021 while on duty travel as special projects officer at the Investment Promotion Authority. As well as having a lovely fragrance, the perfume lasted up to a week on his clothes so Keith started looking at a way to recreate this in PNG as an affordable product. Over the next years he experimented with imported natural essential oils including alcohol-free ‘attar’, developing two scents from this: Mojogo and Tigiamarang. He has since made two more: Moyu and Toru. He sells them in 10ml roll-on glass bottles for just K10 each, with a current daily output of 400 bottles helped by his six children (his Kipi-6 business name refers to his six kids!). Moyu (meaning ‘mama’ in Keith’s mother Christine Ramengga’s East Sepik language) recognises particularly single mothers such as his own, who raised two kids on K100 a fortnight and could not afford the luxury of imported perfume. “My mother is more like a
hero to me,” he said. – Kipi-6 Fragrance
his wife and children, who comb the fibres to separate the strands, soak them overnight to remove binding glues, then grind into paper pulp in a mortar and pestle. After being shaped into sheets, the
paper is dried on a large metal screen, then cut and stitched into bags. Steven’s goal is to buy a pulp-making machine (Hollander beater), which would enable mass production. As well as supermarkets and retail shops as possible outlets for paper shopping bags, he says the paper can be used to make envelopes, business card holders and art canvasses, while the dried fibre can be twisted into twine for bilums or ropes. – Starjel Natfiber Paper
“The biodegradable bags tie in with the Government’s 2019 ban on single-use plastic bags”
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