Arya Djoehana
Served with raw truth and aliveness.
Maybe one of these questions is yours.
Everything matters. Everything pulls a different way. So how can we move as one?
We're stepping into a new territory. So what are its unwritten rules?
I've built something I believe in. So why is it so hard to put into words?
The idea is out there. So why can't people feel it yet?
Everything seems right. So why does something feel missing?
What I do
From what's missing to what's alive.
I find what's alive beneath the obvious and turn it into clarity that sets everything in motion. Business, leadership, brands, culture.
Listen
Get close enough to people to understand what is actually happening.
Shape
Find the idea that can hold the whole thing together.
Express
Turn the idea into something people can encounter and join.
Projects
Same craft, different rooms
- Positioning a country's fashion scene for the world stage
- Repositioning a national food icon in Indonesia
- From discounts to brand love for a food delivery app in Indonesia
- Listening to moto-taxi drivers, pensioners and market traders in West Africa about money on their phones
- Deodorant research in Russia and Indonesia
- Turning a six-day retreat into a place to live in Bali
- Brand foundation and manifesto for an art-led fashion label
- Cashless payments, told as a story festival organisers could resonate with
- Ongoing marketing management for a relational somatic school
- Brand, identity and website for a founder-led investment firm
About
Sometimes I think I'm an alien who is learning to be human. It turned out to be a profession.
I grew up in Indonesia and France and have lived in seven countries. Nothing was default, so I learned to watch where worlds collide.
I became a qualitative researcher and strategist because I like finding the why underneath the why. My education happened through other people's worlds. A market in Dakar. A living room in Moscow. A warung in Jakarta. An office in Sydney. Six continents, a recorder, and no idea yet what I was going to find. I spent fourteen years at Innate Motion, working from Rome, Amsterdam and Singapore, and became a Partner.
Then I got curious about what happens after the strategy, when an idea has to live among people. So I started making experiences. Workshops, events, communities, festivals, music.
In 2020 I started DJing as ARYA on SoundCloud (opens in a new tab). People ask what it has to do with strategy. Everything. A dancefloor is qualitative research at 128 BPM. You read, propose, the room answers, you adjust. Reading two hundred people at 4am taught me more about attention than any tracking study.
I live close to the edges of culture, the scenes and subcultures where the next aesthetic is already normal. That's where you see the shift before it has a name, the code before it reaches the mainstream, the tension a category will feel in three years.
I've always followed what's alive.
Ways in
A conversation.
Thirty minutes, free, no deck. Bring the thing that feels stuck.
A project.
A defined piece of work for marketing leaders, purpose-led companies, and founders. Agencies and insight firms also bring me into their teams as a researcher, moderator, strategist, or creative.
A fraction.
Head of brand or fractional CMO for a founder-led venture. A senior brand mind in your team without the full-time seat.
A team.
After years of advising from outside, I'm looking for one to build with from the inside. Head of brand, strategy director, insight lead.
If any of this lands, drop me a line.
I speak English, French, Indonesian, conversational Italian and I'm learning German.