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Gilgerem
Ninety-five per cent of Mongolia's $57.9 million cosmetics market belongs to imports. Battsetseg Chagdgaa's response was counterintuitive: she united 15 rival brands into a single export coalition, opened a store in Berlin, and pushed twenty products into the EU registration pipeline. The English teacher who couldn't win at home built the door to go abroad.
Transformation Arc
When 95% of a country’s $57.9 million cosmetics market belongs to imports, building a domestic beauty brand is an exercise in structural impossibility. Gilgerem (Гилгэрэм), founded circa 2016 in Ulaanbaatar by Battsetseg Chagdgaa, responded to that impossibility not by competing alone but by building the export infrastructure an entire sector needed.
Origins
Battsetseg Chagdgaa trained as an English teacher-translator — a background that would prove decisive when navigating EU export regulations and international trade shows. Gilgerem began producing handcrafted organic soaps using distinctly Mongolian ingredients: sea buckthorn oil, Siberian cedar nut oil, camel bone marrow, and sheep tail oil, manufactured through Stiletto LLC (Стилетто ХХК) using South Korean beauty product technology.
The brand’s earliest media appearance came in January 2017, when News.MN profiled it as “Mongolian Gift: Gilgerem Organic Soap.” By December, Nikkei Asia was photographing co-founder Otgontsetseg Ganbaatar making camel bone marrow soap in Ulaanbaatar. From the start, Gilgerem’s distribution model was deliberately inclusive: the brand recruited homemakers, elderly citizens, people with disabilities, and students as individual sales agents, building a network that doubled as social enterprise.
The impossible market
Mongolia’s cosmetics market presents a paradox. The beauty industry grows at an estimated 21% annually, yet domestic producers capture barely 5% of it. Over 95% of the roughly 200 billion MNT ($57.9 million) market is served by imports that enter at low tariffs with virtually no safety regulation — Mongolia has no law governing beauty product safety. Domestic producers face outdated national standards (75.6% approved before 2010), no modern commercial testing laboratories, and consumers habituated to foreign brands.
For Battsetseg, the impossible market became personal in 2018 when her daughter Setsen Unenbat fell ill during Ulaanbaatar’s catastrophic air pollution season. A founder manufacturing products to protect skin from environmental damage was watching her own child struggle to breathe. She posted plans to leave the city on social media; 400 people responded. The response became a movement — the NGO Rural Reform–Development Partnership — and eventually, in 2021, Battsetseg herself moved to Khantai village in Bulgan province, managing her Ulaanbaatar businesses remotely while herding goats and keeping bees along the Eg River.
The collective response
No individual Mongolian cosmetics brand had the scale, capital, or regulatory expertise to access European markets alone. EU product registration costs €1,500 per item. For brands pricing at two to three times below competitor organic products, that per-unit regulatory burden was prohibitive without collective action.
In 2019, with €4.5 million in EU TRAM project support, Battsetseg became founding board chair of the Mongolia Cosmetics Cluster — a cooperative uniting 15 competing companies. “We didn’t know, couldn’t do things, had many problems, and instead of trying to solve everything alone, we decided to solve them together,” she told Business.MN. The rivals who had been “hiding information from one another, refusing to assist each other, and quarreling over unfair market competition” became collaborators.
The cluster’s thesis was counterintuitive: if you cannot win at home, export abroad. Under the collective brand “Out of the Green,” member companies developed shared EU market access, ISO 16128 organic compliance, and GMP-certified production standards. In December 2020, a physical store — Mongolian Green Labels — opened in Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel district. An e-commerce platform followed in February 2021, serving all EU member states. Helen Made LLC’s felt soap became the first Mongolian cosmetic product officially registered in the EU; Gilgerem was among five brands that subsequently submitted more than twenty products for authorisation.
The ingredient advantage
Gilgerem’s two signature ingredients anchor the brand to Mongolia’s raw material advantage. Sea buckthorn, the primary botanical, grows prolifically in Uvs province, which contains 70% of all Mongolian sea buckthorn and produced 60% of the 2022 national harvest. “Uvs Chatsargana” became the first Mongolian product to receive EU Protected Geographical Indication status, joining just 19 non-EU countries with products protected at the EU community level. Swedish laboratory testing confirmed that Uvs sea buckthorn oil contains 2.5 times more palmitic acid than oil from other Mongolian regions, with vitamin C content three times higher.
Siberian cedar nut oil, the second signature ingredient, comes from Mongolia’s northern taiga forests. Mongolia is the world’s second-largest cedar nut exporter after Russia, shipping $82–85 million annually — 94% to China at commodity prices. “They are exported to China for a very low price,” Battsetseg has said. “So, we decided to make a value-added hair care product based on cedar nut oil.” The shift from raw commodity export to finished cosmetics captures the value-addition logic at the core of both the brand and the cluster it leads.