Battsetseg Chagdgaa

Battsetseg Chagdgaa (Батцэцэг Чагдаа) was making skincare products to protect Mongolian skin from cold and pollution when her two-year-old daughter Setsen Unenbat fell ill during Ulaanbaatar’s catastrophic 2018 air pollution season. She did not retreat into her factory. She rewired an entire industry — and then abandoned the city entirely.

Being unsuccessful in the domestic market doesn't mean you can't go abroad.

The translator’s advantage #

Ninety-five per cent of Mongolia’s $57.9 million cosmetics market belongs to imports. The arithmetic of domestic production is bleak: outdated national standards, no safety regulation, no commercial testing laboratories, and consumers conditioned to trust Korean and European brands over anything made in Ulaanbaatar.

Battsetseg Chagdgaa trained as an English teacher and translator — a credential that seemed unrelated to soap-making when she founded Gilgerem (Гилгэрэм) around 2016. She ran two small manufacturing businesses through Stiletto LLC (Стилетто ХХК), producing both beauty and household products. Gilgerem was the beauty venture, and its ingredient list read like a nomadic inventory: sea buckthorn oil from Uvs province, Siberian cedar nut oil from the northern taiga, camel bone marrow, and sheep tail oil — all processed using South Korean beauty technology that gave industrial structure to traditional materials.

The brand’s distribution model was as unconventional as its ingredients. Rather than fighting for retail shelf space in a market dominated by imports, Battsetseg built a network of individual sales agents drawn from communities rarely recruited for commercial roles: homemakers, elderly citizens, people with disabilities, students. The social enterprise dimension was deliberate from the start.

The brand found its first media notice in January 2017, when News.MN profiled it as “Mongolian Gift.” By December, Nikkei Asia was photographing her co-founder Otgontsetseg Ganbaatar making camel bone marrow soap in Ulaanbaatar. What appeared to be an artisanal curiosity was building toward something more systematic.

When the air turned personal #

The winter of 2018 changed everything. Ulaanbaatar’s air pollution reached levels where, as Battsetseg later told AFP, “it was impossible for a driver to see any vehicle in front of them.” Her daughter Setsen Unenbat, then two, became ill. “In Ulaanbaatar, it was very difficult for kids to breathe,” she said. “My only desire was to raise my kid in a healthy environment.”

A founder manufacturing products to protect skin from environmental damage was watching her own child struggle to breathe. Ulaanbaatar’s winter pollution — driven by coal burning in the ger districts surrounding the city centre — routinely reaches concentrations many times the WHO safety threshold. It was the kind of contradiction that forces a reckoning. She posted plans to leave the city on social media. Four hundred people responded, wanting to join her. The response became a movement — the Facebook group “Living in the Countryside” — and then an NGO, the Rural Reform–Development Partnership. What began as personal desperation had revealed a collective longing.

Fifteen rivals, one door #

No individual Mongolian cosmetics brand possessed 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 burden was prohibitive without collective action.

Battsetseg’s English-language fluency — the teacher’s credential that had seemed incidental — became the decisive advantage. In 2019, with €4.5 million in EU TRAM project support, she was elected 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.

Under the collective brand “Out of the Green,” the cluster 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.

From Ulaanbaatar to the Eg River #

The woman who built the door to Europe did not stay in the city that needed it. In 2021, at the invitation of a herdsman seeking young settlers, Battsetseg moved with her daughter to Khantai village in Bulgan province, along the Eg River — one of Mongolia’s largest waterways, roughly 400 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar. The transition was not symbolic. She had to learn basic survival skills from scratch: “fetching drinking water from a well, plowing, preparing firewood, lighting the stove and even cooking.” The cosmetics entrepreneur was now a rural settler learning which end of a stove to light.

By 2024, AFP described her as a “former skincare entrepreneur” who “now fishes, herds goats and keeps bees.” Global Press Journal reporting suggests she still owns and manages her Ulaanbaatar businesses remotely. She is establishing a cooperative called Bayalag Khantai for honey and beeswax products under a regional brand. The cosmetics infrastructure she built continues to function; the cluster she chairs continues to push products through EU registration. Her physical absence from the capital has not dissolved her institutional presence.

The woman who preserved the countryside #

Battsetseg initially wanted to “urbanize the countryside” — to bring city efficiency to rural Mongolia. She reversed course. “Now I’m focusing on how to preserve the environment as it is,” she told journalists. She is establishing a new cooperative called Bayalag Khantai to produce honey and beeswax products under a regional brand — applying the same collective organising instinct to agriculture that she brought to cosmetics.

The philosophical arc is complete: a woman who built a skincare brand to protect Mongolian skin from urban pollution ultimately fled the pollution herself. She did not abandon her industry. She proved that building collective infrastructure is more durable than individual ambition — that the door she opened for 15 rivals will remain open whether she stands beside it or not.

Last updated: March 15, 2026