Patrice Mousseau Went from Model to Journalist to Organic-Skincare Entrepreneur
Many entrepreneurs will inform you that what they’re doing now will not be what they initially got down to do. Making main skilled modifications—even mid- to late-career—can typically result in extra fulfilling and profitable outcomes. That’s what our sequence The Pivot is all about. Each month, we communicate to founders, business leaders and entrepreneurs about how—and why—they modified course and located success in a completely completely different trade. Here, we communicate to Patrice Mousseau, founding father of Satya Organics.
Growing up in distant Sioux Lookout, Ont., 350 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay, Patrice Mousseau dreamed of someday turning into a bestselling fiction writer. The self-described voracious reader recollects being the type of pupil who at all times jumped a number of chapters forward of the assigned readings at college. But life took her in a special path after profitable a modelling and expertise competitors in 1994. From there, Mousseau landed a contract with modelling company Ford, then Elite Models, and spent the following three years reserving campaigns for shoppers like Telus and Randy River and strolling the Fashion Cares runway, a profit elevating cash for AIDS/HIV consciousness, alongside RuPaul and Gloria Gaynor.
However, Mousseau by no means fairly took to the modelling way of life. “Modelling is really hard on the ego,” she says. “One day you’re doing a shoot and get treated like a princess, the next you hear all the things agents don’t like about you.” Plus, she hated getting her image taken. During a dialog with a buddy who labored in promoting, she admitted her need to share her tales with the world had by no means disappeared. He instructed she work in media so she may use her storytelling expertise.
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Mousseau spent a number of years working at advert companies and discovered web-development. In 1998, she phoned up the newly based Toronto-based Aboriginal Voices Radio Network (AVRN) and provided to make use of her expertise to construct an internet site for them as a strategy to get her foot within the door. Founder Gary Farmer, who answered the cellphone, favored her voice a lot he provided her a place on-air as a substitute. Within 4 months, she had ascended to the function of AVRN’s program director and spent the following decade as an on-air persona at AVRN and later on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) and CBC. As a journalist, Mousseau interviewed Justin Trudeau, Jack Layton and Ralph Nader.
Shortly earlier than giving start to her daughter, Esme, in 2011, Mousseau’s contract with CBC Manitoba ended and he or she moved to British Columbia to be nearer to her then-partner’s household. In 2012, her eight-month-old daughter developed itchy, pink welts of eczema on her pores and skin. “She was scratching so hard she was bleeding onto her crib sheets,” she says. A physician prescribed steroid cream, however Mousseau needed one thing extra pure.
Mousseau researched for weeks, studying educational papers on pure cures for pores and skin situations, selecting a number of elements to combine right into a treatment: almond oil, calendula-infused jojoba oil, colloidal oatmeal and beeswax. She purchased a used crock pot for $15 on Facebook and blended every little thing collectively into an unctuous balm. Within two days, she says her daughter’s rash disappeared. With a whole crock pot of her concoction to do away with, Mousseau provided the leftovers on Facebook to anybody who wanted it. She ended up brewing three extra crock pots to maintain up with demand. Unwittingly, Mousseau had a burgeoning skincare business on her palms.
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Madeleine Shaw, the founding father of Lunapads (now Aisle), invited Mousseau to attend the Social Venture Institute Women convention and produce her balm. (The two girls met when Mousseau interviewed Shaw for a podcast in her journalism days.) Until then, Mousseau had by no means been concerned about operating her personal firm. “My perception of business has always been pretty negative. I thought it was very extractive, and focused on the bottom line,” she says. “But when I saw companies like Nature’s Path at the conference, which is successful but still maintains its values, I realized I could turn this product into a business.”
At the time, Mousseau was nonetheless doing freelance radio-hosting work and had not too long ago accomplished a radio documentary on Indigenous reconciliation in Canada. So she merely determined so as to add “eczema balm” to the roster of tasks she was engaged on. Mousseau began out promoting her cream at weekend farmers markets in Port Moody and scaled the business by pitching her product to native youngsters’s shops and well being meals shops. But quickly, there was such a requirement for the product that fulfilling orders required all of Mousseau’s consideration. “Changing careers was very natural,” she says. “I didn’t feel a loss because I never closed myself to any journalism opportunities in the future—and I haven’t ruled out going back someday.”
She named her firm Satya Organics, after the Sanskrit phrase for “truth.” The phrase resonated with Mousseau as a result of believes in operating a business that stays true to her values of pure, eco-friendly elements, no matter value or comfort. “I wanted to build a company that I could be proud of and be a role model for my little girl,” she says. Through sheer willpower and hustle, Mousseau landed her product in 70 shops on the decrease mainland by 2020. For on-line gross sales, she recruited stay-at-home mothers on Facebook to behave as makeshift achievement employees, paying them to ship out the product from their houses. “I would put my daughter to bed, then stay up all night making more cream and sleep for three or four hours,” she says.
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Satya’s massive break got here later that 12 months, when Mousseau acquired a name from Whole Foods requesting to inventory her merchandise in 14 shops throughout Canada. Realizing it was time to maneuver out of her kitchen, she started working with Purity Life, an Ontario-based health-product distributor, to distribute her cream on a bigger scale. Mousseau took $700,000 in VC funding from Raven Indigenous Capital Partners—an funding agency that funds Indigenous business ventures—in 2020 to create extra stock, which she paid off in lower than a 12 months with assist from an angel investor buddy. After an look on CBC Radio One in 2021, Mousseau’s product stock offered out in two days. “We’ve doubled our revenues every single year,” she says.
In October 2022, Mousseau discovered of a Loblaws pitch competitors by the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. She shot a two-minute pitch video, highlighting that Satya had all the right processes, software program, insurance coverage and certifications in place to get the product on retailer cabinets in brief order. The judging panel beloved it. As of July, Satya is now carried in 1,100 Shoppers Drug Mart places, in addition to 600 different shops throughout the nation. The firm has not too long ago expanded its product choices to incorporate a soothing oat and calendula flower tub soak, which comes with a QR code linking to a playlist of Indigenous musicians so clients and activate the tunes and loosen up. And, for these with a inexperienced thumb, the soak’s seeds may be scooped out after the tub and used to develop a calendula plant.
Next up, Mousseau is planning to develop into the U.S. and Asia, and making ready the paperwork to show Satya right into a B corp, a certification exhibiting {that a} business meets particular social and environmental efficiency requirements. She’s additionally creating an innovation lab the place small-scale magnificence producers, notably Indigenous girls, can work on their formulations and obtain professional steering.
At the top of the day, Mousseau says that Satya’s success would imply nothing with out her daughter. “My little girl is now 11 and she feels like she can do anything,” she says. “Little boys in the schoolyard have said, ‘Women can’t be the boss,’ and Esme replied, ‘My mummy is the boss of everything.’ She doesn’t see any limits—nor should she.”
