Eighteen years ago, on a tour through Israel, Ronnie Yeo walked into the Qumran caves as a traveller and walked out with an assignment he hadn't asked for.

"When I was in the Qumran caves, the Lord told me, audibly, to bring AHAVA to Singapore," he says. "I obeyed."

There was no business plan behind it and no market-entry strategy, only a conviction he couldn't quite explain and wouldn't ignore. He came home, and not long after, opened the first AHAVA flagship at Centrepoint.

Seven stores, and the harder decision

The climb that followed was anything but straight. At its height, AHAVA Singapore ran seven standalone stores and sat on the shelves of most Guardian pharmacies across the island. For a while, that felt like the shape of things to come. Then rent began to climb, staffing costs followed, and one by one the stores became harder to justify.

Ronnie eventually made a decision that cost him something. He closed the standalone stores and held on to the original Centrepoint flagship, the first door he ever opened, keeping it running until September 2024. Then he did the harder thing and took AHAVA Singapore fully online.

"To keep our customers happy, and to keep our prices fair, we decided to go completely online," he says. "It has worked well, for us and for them."

There's a quieter kind of courage in that: knowing when to let go of the thing you built with your own hands so the thing you actually believe in can keep going.

What keeps customers for eighteen years

Ask Ronnie why customers are still with him and he doesn't talk about marketing. He talks about what's in the bottle.

AHAVA's formulations are built on the Dead Sea's unusual mineral profile: magnesium, which helps calm stressed, reactive skin, and potassium, which regulates how skin holds on to moisture. For skin that lives through Singapore's heat and humidity, oily by noon and parched in air-conditioning by three, that combination isn't a slogan. It's the reason a tired, unbalanced complexion gradually starts to feel like itself again.

The research behind those formulas is real and ongoing. AHAVA runs its own R&D arm at the Dead Sea, the Dead Sea Laboratories, and has spent years working with university researchers: an innovation laboratory at Shenkar College's chemical engineering department, clinical research with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and most recently a European Union research consortium developing safer, more sustainable cosmetic ingredients.

"There is much research behind these products, and we keep improving them," Ronnie says. "That is what keeps our customers happy, and coming back."

The proof is the man

The most convincing testimony, in the end, is Ronnie himself.

At 76, he still uses AHAVA every single day, largely the same products he started with. The Men's Exfoliating Cleansing Gel every evening, which suits his oily skin. The Mineral Shower Gel, which leaves a light protective veil rather than a sticky film. When he travels somewhere dry, the Mineral Body Lotion or Dermud Nourishing Body Cream goes in the bag to keep dry-skin itch at bay. The Mineral Shampoo travels with him too.

"A 76-year-old man," he says, "with hardly any white hair."

He isn't reading from a script. He's telling you what sits on his own bathroom shelf.

The next eighteen years

Eighteen years on, the ambition hasn't grown any more complicated than it was in the cave.

"For the future, we want to keep bringing the goodness of the Dead Sea to Singaporeans," he says.

Which is, more or less, the same conviction that stopped a man in his tracks all those years ago, still running quietly, one bottle at a time.