Meet Sarah Hartono | Cofounder & COO

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah Hartono and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, how does your business help the community?
It takes a village to raise a child. We’ve realized that – rather than creating something on our own to help the community and the world – we wanted to create a positive impact WITH the community. For us, it first starts with listening to people’s life experiences and pain points and working together to find a solution.

When we sat down with people during the pandemic, we heard their stories of navigating personal mental health issues that stemmed from childhood. Parents shared about feeling weighed down by parenting guilt as they juggled working from home while caring for their children.

We realized that addressing social/emotional health in childhood is the key to a flourishing life. We wanted to support and empower parents and caretakers. This is why we created MILLU. It takes a village to raise a child. That’s why we co-create our kits with a community of industry professionals, friends, therapists, educators, and families.

We ask them our golden question, “What is something you know now that you wished you knew when you were younger?” This wisdom from the community becomes the building blocks for our fun, immersive kits touching on vital life topics while – creating empowering, quality time between children and adults.

Our first kit theme helps children embrace their uniqueness. They learn that what makes them different and quirky is actually their superpower, and they can confidently empower and help others in their own special way. We invite families to engage in our immersive story, crafts, games, and discussion questions, sharing impactful quality time together that prepares children for a flourishing life. All while having fun!

We’ve also been blessed to partner with NGOs and after-school care programs that empower under-served children within the foster care system and parents and children affected by trauma. We believe every child deserves a safe and empowering environment where they are seen, valued, and loved.

Join us on this mission!
If you want to become a part of our MILLU community and co-create with us email us at Hello@millubox.com or send us a DM on Instagram.

Together, let’s help the world reconnect with those who will shape its future.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
To me (Sarah), MILLU is a “thank you business” for my parents—immigrant parents who sacrificed extra stability and margin in life to instead be present in their children’s lives. My parents came from Indonesia in their young adult lives. They each had parents who, due to the incredibly needed reason of putting food on the table, weren’t able to spend much time with their kids.

My parents are rebels and wanted to change that. I remember my mom telling my dad, “I don’t need your money, I need your time for our kids.”

As their child now, I realize how I’ve received the benefit of their loving sacrifices. As an adult now, my parents are some of my best friends who act as advisors in my life, and I love how they have raised me to be independent, yet supported.

I desire to make family quality time more accessible across the board and to raise awareness on how something so simple is truly so important for a person’s healthy formation. MILLU is an outpouring of love from our family to yours, designed to be customizable and flexible for your unique family needs and quirks. We carefully engineer each touchpoint in all the play times to be with parents and kids together, and we make it simple to talk about things that would be hard/awkward to bring up in every day situations.

We are MILLU, and we are for all families.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
LA is a fun place to discover slowly, bit by bit. Just immerse yourself.

My favorite places include Sawtelle for the good food and heading to the Santa Monica Pier for the touristy beach.

I also would want to show you the hidden gems on the budding Indonesian community by going to the Deco Building (beautiful coworking space with Indonesian boutiques), Awan (Indonesian-inspired coconut milk ice cream), and Simpang (Indonesian food)!

I’d show you the classics: Melrose and Little Tokyo and walking through the Fashion District where many of our founder friends have family businesses (shoutout to Kid’s Dream!).

Lastly, I’d show you K-town and a mural on Olympic and Vermont where my artist friend Josh @xo.chocolamb just finished a sick mural for and with the community.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
We couldn’t do this without the support of our MILLU Makers. We’re thankful to our early MILLU family board, beta-testers, collaborators, customers, and friends who’ve come over to pack these kits! It’s been amazing to see people jumping into the mission of helping families thrive.

Thank you to our professors at Biola University and Silvia Mah at the Office of Innovation for hosting the startup competition. Shoutout to OCEAN Programs, which took us through their amazing accelerator program that helped us launch as a startup.
Lastly, thank you to our amazing teammates, advisors, co-creators, and partners:

Shoutout to the MILLU team, Silvia, James, Jordan, Emily, Riya, Anne, Marlene, Ocean Programs cohort, OC United, Olive Crest, Chess School, and all of our MILLU families.

And lastly, our parents: Eunkyung, Kunyung, Anna, and Muliady. Love you guys!

Website: millubox.com

Instagram: @millubox

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/millubox/about/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/millubox