Satya Organic Inc

Patrice Mousseau is a Canadian indigenous business woman who launched a successful career as a television host, news anchor, and journalist. After becoming a mother, she transitioned to conscientious entrepreneur when her daughter developed eczema. Determined to find a simple, natural product she researched traditional indigenous medicines and created an innovative formula in her crockpot clearing her daughter’s eczema in two days. 

Patrice is now the Founder & CEO of Satya Organics Inc., the only Health Canada approved, certified USDA organic product on the market for the growing number of people worldwide with severe skin conditions desperate for an effective natural alternative to potent steroid creams. Satya is currently shipped worldwide and in nearly 900 retailers in Canada and Asia. Core values for Satya are truth, integrity and sustainability stemming from Patrice's own values of being a single Mom and member of Fort William Ojibway First Nation in Ontario, Canada. 

About 20% of the world’s population suffers from eczema. In some regions of the world eczema has increased by an estimated 60% in the last 10-15 years.

Satya is a clean, simple topical skin-care product used to treat eczema and other chronic skin conditions. Made with only five natural ingredients that have been shown in scientific studies to provide anti-inflammatory and soothing properties on the skin, Satya is a safe alternative to harmful steroid-based products. It was designed to be clean and simple for a reason: eczema is often triggered by exposure to environmental chemicals. Knowledge about the “dirty contaminants and toxic chemicals found in skin-care and cosmetic products are factors contributing to the increased incidence of conditions like eczema. As Patrice says, “we need to hold this entire industry up to account and start making good products that are actually safe and do what they say they’ll do.”’ 

The incidence of eczema and psoriasis is on the rise, especially in the Global South, and it disproportionately affects people of colour and kids.  In a recent report by the Eczema Society of Canada, 27% of people have waited six months or longer to see a dermatologist about their eczema, while 42% say they’ve visited a doctor four or more times in the past two years to manage symptoms. And 29 % say they’ve used 15+ different treatments in hopes of finding relief. Presently, there is no cure for eczema, leaving those affected desperate for a safe, effective product. Many people with eczema (including children) often turn to steroid creams. Long-term use of steroid products pose serious health risks including skin discolouration, negative effects on the endocrine system, cardiovascular health, and steroid withdrawal syndrome (TSW). Satya's knowledge of indigenous medicines and holistic view of health developed the right solution.

Satya all-natural eczema relief product has changed the life of thousands of Canadians, including young children. Unlike steroid based creams, Satya’s product is safe enough to be used around the eyes, mouth and other sensitive areas.  We’ve doubled revenue year over year since it started—barely able to keep up with demand. 

Satya Organic developed an all-natural and effective formula based on traditional indigenous medicines to relieve eczema and severely dry or inflamed skin without the use  steroids or other synthetic chemicals and non-natural additives. Satya’s ingredients have anti-inflammatory and skin-soothing properties, which when carefully balanced together in our proprietary formula,  help repair the skin’s natural barrier properties so it can protect the body as it’s meant to do. Unlike most products on the market, we do not add any fillers or preservatives. Satya Organics Eczema Relief product is truly made from only Certified USDA-organic natural ingredients; and, it’s approved by Health Canada as a natural health product to effectively treat persistent dry, itchy and inflamed skin, such as eczema. 

There’s no worse feeling than witnessing your child suffer. Satya Organic continues to serve babies, children and their parents first and foremost because children are exposed to harmful chemicals more than ever before.  Yet around the world, families are prescribed steroid creams as a first line of treatment for mild and severe eczema. Many parents are unaware that these pharmaceuticals carry serious risk of side effects, like thinning and discolouration of the skin, burning, infection, glaucoma or blindness or unwanted hair growth. Many have experienced the harms already.  

Ojibway entrepreneur and founder Patrice Mousseau started Satya Organic because she couldn’t find something clean and effective for her baby’s eczema on shelves. Even among the so-called “natural” skin care products, she found that ”many products are full of ingredients you can’t even pronounce, if they’re listed at all” she says. “Many of them are even carcinogens.” Fast forward five years and Satya Organic’s powerful skin care formula is healing children’s skin around the world with a 100% natural and clean formula that’s completely steroid-free. “I have people who are emailing me and calling me on a daily basis saying, ‘Oh my God, this has been a life-changer for me.’”   

Inspired by Indigenous values of sustainability, Satya not only delivers products that are genuinely good for people, but good for the planet. Every single Satya product is recyclable and refillable with our compostable refill pouch. 

Determined to transform the skin care industry, Satya is carbon neutral with the Coastal First Nations’ Great Bear Rainforest initiative. All employees are paid a living wage, and are single moms. The Satya Stick is redefining sustainability in partnership with the Plastic Bank: Each purchase of the refillable Stick helps pay people in developing countries to pull plastic from waterways, fighting poverty and ocean plastics. 

Satya Organic was first developed from a Mother’s love. “My baby girl, Esme, was scratching her arms and legs bloody. The doctor said it was eczema and prescribed a steroid cream. I knew there had to be another solution, so I started looking at what was on the market shelves. It had to be effective, non toxic, fragrance free, with scientifically supported research. I couldn't find anything good enough. I started looking into existing medical research, traditional medicine, as well as the latest studies coming out of universities. Soon, I was experimenting in my kitchen crockpot and developed a balm that cleared Esme's eczema up in two days.” 

Patrice hires only single mothers and caregivers and pays them a living wage. Satya never pressures sales through aggressive marketing. Rather, the goal is to educate people that there is a natural alternative to steroids that actually works. We ensure every piece of advertising is inclusive of all genders, races, socioeconomic statuses and abilities. And our prices are kept low enough to ensure single mothers around the world can afford Satya, as natural health products are often out of reach for lower-income families.

Eczema is an illness that affects so many people, often children and people of colour. There is no cure for it, and relatively little is known about why it occurs. There’s no worse feeling than witnessing your baby suffer, bleeding and scratching through the night, only to be told there’s no real solution. Once she learned how many babies are affected by this torturing illness, she knew she had to help others heal naturally. But she wasn’t a business person, and didn’t want to be pushing profit over people. It was only when she discovered that businesses could uphold Indigenous values, delivering 100% social and ethical goods that she decided to teach herself to do it..   

As CEO Patrice, the Ojibway entrepreneur behind Satya, says: “This is something that not only is possible, but we are really good at. Culturally, as indigenous women, we are far more used to working in a community and having everyone’s voice heard versus a typical Western hierarchy. We are a lot more circular and I think that’s the direction a lot of businesses are going to—the idea that everyone has value—and we as indigenous people do that naturally.” 

Patrice’s background in journalism gave her the skills and passion to innovate a solution grounded in science. She formulated Satya as an effective remedy for her daughter’s eczema. It’s no small task to produce a product without alcohol and other chemicals that extend shelf life, while achieving the same results as pharmaceuticals. For this reason, most natural skin care products marketed for eczema contain extracts and hidden chemicals. “That should not be legal, let alone promoted to people, especially children,” says Patrice. “People have the right to know exactly what they’re putting on their skin." 

This commitment to the truth inspired Patrice to call the company Satya, which translates to truth in Sanskrit. In order to serve the bottom line, many skin care companies sell the most watered-down version of a product possible, still labelling it natural. Satya challenges this skincare norm by developing a 100% pure product with no fillers using the highest quality ingredients while encouraging customers to use less, not more. Though this means customers only need to purchase more Satya every 6 months to a year, it’s better for the environment and the customer. 

“We want customers to know that they can demand better. Then hopefully we can actually start instituting change, not just for the beauty products themselves but in how a company engages the environment.” 

Satya has won SheEo’s National business competition, UPS “Pitch the Dragons”,

BC Aboriginal Achievement Awards, StartUp Canada’s Indigenous Entrepreneur of the Year Award and FWE’s “Pitch for the Purse. 

Being an Indigenous woman entrepreneur as a single mother is no easy task. Accessing capital and credibility within the context of systemic racism and ongoing colonialism presents barriers at every turn. Yet, Satya continues to grow, while placing sustainability over profit. Samples which are extremely wasteful as they’re made with single use plastic, expensive to create and never enough for customers—if they even use them. But rather than refusing to produce them, Satya set out to figure out a sustainable solution. After many months, we found a way to create a completely compostable and recyclable sample using paper and tin. They’re completely new to the market. They’re also cost effective, enabling customers to sample Satya for up to four days. This is important because those with eczema have spent hundreds of dollars on skin care gimmicks that most often don’t work. 

Since COVID-19, we’ve pivoted to serve not only those with eczema but frontline workers (nurses and grocery clerks) with severely dry and damaged hands from washing and sanitization. This pivot has supported an unprecedented spike in skin conditions and sales and awareness of Satya as a versatile skin care solution.

As a journalist Patrice learned the best thing she could do is listen. She’s built a team that’s empowered to follow their own moral compass and support the company in doing just that. Patrice also uses every opportunity to speak publicly and one-on-one with other Indigenous women to encourage them to see beyond their perceived limits, to offer encouragement and support. The barriers to entrepreneurship for Indigenous women can seem insurmountable. To name just one, Indigenous women who live on Canadian reserves are often excluded from loans outright because they don’t personally own their homes; they’re held in trust by the Canadian government. Beyond this, systemic racism in the banking and business sectors exclude them from the table at every turn. By sharing her own barriers openly and without shame, Patrice strives to break down stereotypes of who is a business person and to create community for a marginalized population with so much to offer. That’s because as matriarchal leaders, Indigenous women are never seeking to profit for themselves. Everything they create and build is for the good of the next seven generations, and beyond.

Unlike many natural remedies for skin issues marketed to children and parents, the Satya formula is an all-natural topical anti-inflammatory made of five ingredients that’s completely free from harmful additives, and backed by science, making Satya the only NPN-approved, certified organic eczema product on the market. 

This is extremely rare in the natural skin care industry, to the detriment of people suffering from immune-related skin conditions like eczema, which are often triggered by environmental chemicals. Inspired by Indigenous values of circularity and sustainability, Satya delivers products that meet the highest standard of health for people and the planet. Every single product packaging we use is recyclable and/or refillable with our compostable refill pouches, and we encourage our customers to purchase our refill pouches whenever possible.

The Satya Stick in particular, is redefining sustainable skin care. Rather than using cardboard stick packaging which is single use, we chose a durable, fully refillable and reusable plastic stick. To offset the plastic, we developed a partnership with the Plastic Bank: Each purchase of Satya Stick helps pay people in developing countries to pull plastic from their waterways for recycling in exchange for credits toward education, medical care and household items. This builds entrepreneurship while addressing poverty and removing plastic from global waterways before they become ocean plastics. We are also in partnership with the Great Bear rainforest Initiative, offsetting all of our carbon emissions. As a company, we currently address 13 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Our theory of change is steeped in our identity as an Indigenous woman-owned business. Long before notions of capitalism defined economic progress through profit, Indigenous people exercised entrepreneurship by serving the community first and foremost. Satya has shown that running a business putting people first, even if it means making less money in the short-term, not only works, but can transform the entire industry. 

Through these values, we’re changing the healthcare industry so more medical practitioners are aware of the harms of ubiquitous topical steroids and recognize the importance of a holistic approach to healing skin illnesses. In the short-term, we clearly label our products as steroid-free, educate around the risks of prolonged use, and share knowledge from holistic health practitioners. Our main customer base are women, the health providers in the family, who then take this information and share it with friends and family who invariably have skin conditions like eczema. We’re also transforming the skincare industry, riddled with single-use packaging, highly inflated prices for products that are filled with toxic chemicals that permanently pollute our waterways. To address this short-term, we use only 5 certified organic ingredients that come directly from nature, such as beeswax and calendula that actually enhance the land. Our products are exclusively refillable and recyclable and labelled as such. We encourage people to purchase our refills to lower carbon emissions and waste through discount incentives and website design, while clearly communicating through videos that customers only need to use a very small amount of Satya. Longer-term, our goal is to secure land to grow our ingredients as well as those of other Indigenous entrepreneurs  their own herbal products in a localized and sustainable way, knowing that each woman entrepreneur not only helps her own family, but her entire community and beyond. We’re growing a network of Indigenous women entrepreneurs putting collaboration over hierarchy, exemplified by our project to access a shared 3D printer to empower more Indigenous women to build products and companies they’ve always dreamed of, but have been excluded from due to systemic racism and a host of other financial barriers.

“A huge motivator for me is knowing that I’m actually affecting change in people’s lives… here with my business, I’m finally able to do that,” says Patrice. We have thousands of customers across Canada and export to the United States and Hong Kong. Our vision is to bring Satya to everyone who needs it worldwide. Currently, we serve tens of thousands of people. 

We’ve been growing 67 per cent each year since we started. With 20 percent of the world population suffering from eczema, there’s no reason why we can’t be serving millions within five years. 

By boldly and publicly holding other industry players to account, declining partnerships, refusing additional products that are wasteful in any way, CEO Patrice Mousseau, the Ojibway entrepreneur behind Satya, is modelling a new way to do business. “We need to hold this entire industry up to account and go look: You need to start making good products for people that don’t harm them and actually help them and do what they say they do.”  Through collaboration, fearless honesty, and fighting systems of patriarchy and hierarchy, she’s combining efforts with other Indigenous women entrepreneurs to change the world of business, the skin care industry and the health care industry that continues to put profitable pharmaceuticals over lasting solutions and prevention. And these entrepreneurs have a skyrocketing consumer base to redefine success.  “Very often, products are out there and are cheap but somebody’s paying the price somewhere, be it a worker or the environment, the chemicals being dumped into your waters or plastics. We’re trying to change that. If we can be sort of a role model for that, then customers know that they can demand that sort of thing, then hopefully we can actually start instituting change not just for the products themselves but the industry.” Thanks to Satya, customers can heal their skin while supporting an Indigenous owned, single mom and caregiver operated business, lower carbon emissions, reduce waste and fight global poverty and ocean.

The barriers we face are:

Technical: Accessing labs and researchers to do independent studies and do formulations for product line extensions, because there's so much need.

Legal: We need to be pursuing IP and trademark protections in different countries so we can protect our traditional knowledge and our brands.

Cultural: We don't want to be ghettoized for benign Indigenous. We are a great brand doing great things and we don't want to be marginalized because of it due to systemic racism and prejudice surrounding Indigenous people.

Market: Having the capital to enter new markets is a huge barrier, if we see fast growth demand as we have before, this can potentially crush us if we don't have the capital to back it up.

Technical and Legal : We are developing partnerships with consultant Dr. Rina Carlini with Optimal Innovation Group to support and advise us on how to grow our technological and legal capacity, including IP protection and developing the studies needed to back out products with evidence. 

Cultural: We are showing the value of what we’re doing in and of itself, our success in itself combats negative stereotypes, showing the world Indigenous women can succeed in business. 

Market: We are exploring a partnership with Raven Venture Capital in Canada as an Indigenous venture capital company that is happy to support our needs and desires to scale and grow in addition to all of the support of SheEO, Vancity and our local Indigenous funder Tale’awtxw Aboriginal Capital. This Elevate award would be a huge support in getting the many dimensions of our systems change goals off the ground. 

In partnership with the Plastic Bank, each purchase of the fully refillable and reusable Satya Stick helps pay people in developing countries to pull plastic from sensitive waterways, fighting poverty and ocean plastics at the same time. People in developing countries around the world can harvest plastic out of their waterways in exchange for credit at a local plastic depot which they can use toward medical care, educational tuition and household items. 

We’re a SheEO venture and a core member of this radically redesigned ecosystem that supports, finances, and celebrates female innovators. Launched in 2015 in Canada, this visionary model is emerging as a leading global innovation that is totally unique, focused on bringing out the best of women by being radically generous to one another.

The Coastal First Nations Great Bear Rainforest Initiative is our partner for carbon neutrality, owned and run by B.C. First Nations while supporting forests over waste and climate change. 

The incidence of Eczema has increased an estimated 60% in the last 10-15 years. An estimated 20% of the world’s population under eight at some point will suffer from eczema.  Satya is the  only USDA certified organic, Health Canada NPN approved topical anti-inflammatory on the market. Satya Organic is an all-natural and effective formula based on traditional medicines to relieve eczema and severely dry skin without the steroids or other hidden chemicals and additives, unlike most eczema and eczema baby products on shelves. Satya is made in Canada and distributed across the country in retail and online. Satya is currently sold in over 800 stores across Canada and Hong Kong. Satya also has customers around the world through its online store. We are also involved in trade missions into other regions, such as Taiwan. We are in the midst of securing our FDA to serve those suffering from eczema and other skin illnesses in the US market. With the rapid shift to online platforms since COVID-19, we’re rapidly developing and improving our online store to better serve global markets.

Satya is a for-profit business. We chose a for-profit model because we believe people are willing to pay for our high-quality, natural and clean skin care products. That said, in keeping with our values, we are a social venture that’s not here to make a profit at whatever cost to people and the environment. We price Satya Organic so it is affordable to single mothers, like Patrice, even though our high quality ingredients and sustainable packaging make it more costly to produce. We use high quality, reusable and recyclable packaging even though it costs us more money because it’s better for our planet. Having doubled revenue year over year for the last five years, our revenue model has proven sustainable and that people around the world want to support genuinely sustainable skin care products—proving that you can run a successful business that puts people and the planet over profit. 

In 2019 we received a contribution from Western Economic Diversification Canada through the Women Entrepreneurship Fund; in 2018 we were approved for a contribution from Global Affairs Canada's CanExport Project;  in 2017 we received a zero-interest loan from SheEO. As a for-profit manufacturer, most of our revenue is generated through product sales (57% online sales, 43% in stores).

We're currently seeking funding from CanExport in order to continue growing Satya internationally and helping more parents and their children overcome skin conditions like eczema, naturally. While we ship worldwide through our online store, Satya is sold in stores in Canada and Hong Kong, and we’re eager to grow our retail presence in other countries. We're also currently competing for funding for an innovative project that would revolutionize the way small independent artisans manufacture their goods through the use of 3D printers in order to support other Indigenous entrepreneurs.

Finally, we are working on sourcing access to land in order to grow some of our own ingredients. COVID-19 has reminded us of how precarious the supply chain is, and it’s been increasingly difficult to source calendula specifically. More and more Canadians want to support 100% local and organic products. To genuinely serve this demand and uphold our company value of satya, truth, our goal is to grow calendula and source beeswax and oats more directly and locally. With access to land, we can also support other Indigenous businesses in growing their own ingredients while securing the supply chains of Indigenous Canadian entrepreneurs. 

We would prefer not to disclose our expected expenses publicly.