Siberi Farm

Mongolia has no ocean ports, no domestic cosmetics manufacturing to ISO standards, and an economy more than 80 percent reliant on mining exports. From this starting position, Siberi Farm (Сиберри фарм) built a four-country corporate architecture to ship organic sea buckthorn skincare from a 65-hectare farm in Töv Province to shelves in twelve countries.

The brand manager’s bet

The company’s origin story begins not on the Mongolian steppe but in Los Angeles. D. Bolortuya Dorjsuren (Д. Болортуяа) spent eight years as brand manager at Cailyn Cosmetics, a US-based beauty company distributed across 161 countries. For nearly a decade she navigated the operational mechanics that Mongolia’s beauty sector had never acquired: multi-jurisdiction regulatory compliance, international packaging standards, distribution partnerships spanning Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Her father, Ch. Dorjsuren, had been cultivating sea buckthorn on a 65-hectare farm in Altanbulag soum, Töv Province, since approximately 2003. The agricultural asset existed. What it lacked was someone who understood how to convert raw berries into branded products and move them across borders. Bolortuya returned to Mongolia around 2012, approached Donald Siegel of Turning Point Holdings as a business partner, and registered Seaberry Farm Products LLC the following year. Every structural decision that followed reflected the specific expertise she had accumulated at Cailyn: how to architect multi-country operations, navigate international regulatory requirements, and position a brand for consumers in foreign markets. Mongolia’s sea buckthorn had existed for generations. What Bolortuya brought home was the operational knowledge to package and move it. The gap between what she had left — managing a brand across 161 markets — and what she had returned to — a sea buckthorn farm, four administrative staff, and a country with no cosmetics manufacturing infrastructure — was the distance the company would need to cross.

“I came back to Mongolia with the purpose of helping my family business by developing new products based on the seabuckthorn oil extract,” Bolortuya told GoGo Mongolia in 2015. “We cannot depend on mining alone and Mongolia has advantage in farming as well.”

The Singapore bypass

Mongolia’s geography is the constraint. Landlocked between Russia and China, with limited logistics infrastructure and no direct shipping access to international markets, the country requires structural workarounds for any export-oriented business. For a beauty startup founded in 2013, the absence of ISO-compliant cosmetics manufacturing facilities at home presented an equally fundamental problem: the products could not be made where the ingredients grew.

Siberi Farm’s response was architectural rather than incremental. The company established Seaberry PTE LTD in Singapore as a logistics hub and product testing center, contracted ISO-compliant manufacturing facilities in Bali for finished product production, set up Seaberry Korea LLC for additional manufacturing and warehousing, and registered Seaberry USA LLC for American distribution. The four-country structure — raw materials from Mongolia, manufacturing in Indonesia and South Korea, logistics through Singapore, distribution in the United States — was designed around the constraint of geographic isolation rather than despite it.

The approach consumed time and capital. Eighteen months of product development with formulation experts from the United States, France, Australia, and South Korea preceded any commercial revenue. By March 2015, the company had yet to turn a profit. “It will take two more years to actually have profits, as we have been working to come up at global level, we bear huge costs,” Bolortuya acknowledged. “We are competing with giants in the industry who have been around for at least 10 years and some have the history of 50-100 years.”

The weight of that admission matters. Mongolia’s total cosmetics market is estimated at roughly $57.9 million, with over 95 percent served by imports and only around 40 authorized domestic manufacturers competing for the remainder. Siberi Farm was not entering a market that welcomed local challengers. It was attempting to export from one that could barely supply itself. Asian consumers, Bolortuya discovered, needed education about sea buckthorn’s benefits — the ingredient lacked the brand recognition it carried in European markets. Government documentation requirements compounded the friction: “so many copies of one document” submitted to different agencies with no online submission. The limited shelf life of organic products with no preservatives added another layer of logistical risk to every international shipment.

The company’s four administrative staff in Ulaanbaatar managed this multinational operation — a span of organizational complexity disproportionate to the team’s size but proportionate to the geography.

From farm to shelf

The company’s raw material base is the 65-hectare organic sea buckthorn plantation in Altanbulag soum (Алтанбулаг), Töv Province, established by co-founder Ch. Dorjsuren approximately a decade before the beauty brand existed. The farm employs 30 permanent workers, expanding to 80 during harvest season. Supplementing the family operation are 28 cooperative agreements with independent sea buckthorn growers managed through a subsidiary, Bayasakh Trade LLC, giving the company access to broader raw material supply without the capital requirements of land acquisition. The cooperative model extends Siberi Farm’s sourcing footprint while maintaining the organic standards on which the brand’s credibility depends.

Sea buckthorn oil is extracted in Mongolia, then shipped to partner facilities for formulation into finished products: body soap, facial cream, facial scrub, anti-aging serum, shampoo, conditioner, lip nourishment, and pure sea buckthorn oil. A health product line — capsules, organic tea, juice — extends the ingredient into adjacent categories. All products carry organic certification from the Mongolian Chamber of Industry and Commerce and contain no artificial preservatives, which constrains shelf life but reinforces the brand’s organic positioning.

The ingredient itself carries a market tailwind. The global sea buckthorn market is valued at approximately $340-510 million and growing at 9-11 percent annually. Mongolia’s harsh continental climate — winter temperatures plunging below minus 30 degrees Celsius — reportedly produces berries with superior anti-aging properties compared to Chinese, European, and Canadian variants, a claim the company treats as its primary competitive distinction. “Whenever people hear the word Mongolia, the first thing that comes up to mind is nature and organic,” Bolortuya told GoGo Mongolia. “This is our advantage, which we need to utilize.” The company’s packaging features Mongolia’s history and landscape, converting the country’s remoteness from a liability in logistics into an asset in brand positioning.

The credibility phase

The years between 2015 and 2016 marked Siberi Farm’s breakthrough period. The first product reviews appeared on Mongolian beauty blogs in February 2015 — cleansing soap, scrub, moisturizer — signaling that the brand had reached consumers. In March 2015, Bolortuya announced a supply contract with Whole Foods — a landmark claim for any Mongolian consumer product, though one that has not been independently confirmed and may have remained an unexecuted agreement. No Seaberry products appear on the Whole Foods website, and the gap between announcement and verification is itself revealing of the credibility challenges facing Mongolian export brands. By April 2016, the company reported retail presence in twelve countries including the United States, China, South Korea, and Hong Kong, with its first domestic branch store opening in Ulaanbaatar (Улаанбаатар) alongside an integrated beauty salon.

External validation arrived in May 2016 when Bolortuya was selected as one of sixteen Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs for Ernst & Young’s Accelerating Entrepreneurs program — the sole Mongolian representative — attending the EY Strategic Growth Forum in Shanghai. By October of that year, a company presentation titled “Mongolian seabuckthorn to the international market” was being circulated to investors and conference audiences, signaling a shift from survival-mode operations to strategic growth positioning. The same year, Mongolia passed its Law on Organic Food, strengthening the regulatory framework supporting Siberi Farm’s organic positioning.

These milestones positioned the brand as Mongolia’s most internationally visible beauty company during a period when the domestic market remained over 95 percent dependent on imports. The brand had done what no Mongolian beauty company had done before: built functioning distribution infrastructure across multiple continents from a starting position of near-total geographic disadvantage.

The cost beyond the balance sheet

On International Women’s Day 2018, Bolortuya was severely assaulted. She went public on March 16, posting on Facebook — the message was shared 569 times. She appeared on television in subsequent weeks, sharing the difficulties of a criminal case stalled by law enforcement. She spent weeks visiting police, receiving treatment, and advocating not only for herself but for other survivors she encountered at the emergency room and police station.

Bolortuya acknowledged her comparatively privileged position: a stable financial situation, family support, professional recognition. Many women she encountered in the process had none of these. The business challenges — landlocked logistics, absent manufacturing, giant competitors — had structural solutions. This crisis required a different endurance. Bolortuya continued running the company through the aftermath while becoming a public voice against gender-based violence in Mongolia, embodying the collision between entrepreneurial ambition and the personal costs women face in male-dominated business environments. The case outcome remains unknown from available sources.

The infrastructure bet

Siberi Farm’s significance lies less in its sea buckthorn formulations than in the infrastructure improvisation required to export anything from a landlocked developing economy. The four-country corporate architecture that Siberi Farm constructed was itself the primary innovation — a supply chain engineered specifically for a country that lacks the logistics, manufacturing, and regulatory infrastructure taken for granted in established beauty markets. Competitors have found their own approaches to these constraints: Lhamour, Mongolia’s first organic skincare brand established in 2015, focused on domestic market penetration; Goo Brand, with over 35 products and branches in Japan and China, pursued a different international strategy. None has replicated the multi-country corporate structure — Singapore for logistics, Bali for manufacturing, Korea for production, the US for distribution — that Siberi Farm built from scratch with a team of four.

Then came the crises that no architecture could anticipate. COVID-19 closed Mongolia’s borders in early 2020, triggering the country’s first recession in a decade. Food prices rose over 15 percent. For a company whose entire business model depended on moving raw materials from Mongolia to manufacturing facilities in Bali and Korea, then distributing finished goods through Singapore to twelve countries, the pandemic struck at every node of the supply chain simultaneously. No significant public coverage of the company has appeared since. An estimated annual revenue of $2.6 million, drawn from a third-party algorithmic source, suggests continued operations but cannot be independently verified.

What can be verified is the structural contribution. Mongolia’s national Chatsargana program expanded sea buckthorn cultivation to over 6,000 hectares. The Uvs Chatsargana variety received EU Protected Geographical Indication status in 2022. The government’s Vision-2050 targets 5 percent organic-certified agricultural production by 2030. The policy tailwinds for Mongolian natural beauty continue to build. Siberi Farm constructed the first export architecture capable of riding them — a template for how a landlocked country with no cosmetics infrastructure can participate in global beauty markets, built not on product innovation but on supply chain design.

Last updated: March 15, 2026