Out of the Green: A Collective Export Gambit

Tuuvee Dash makes soap from camel milk in Dalanzadgad, a town of 29,000 people at the edge of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Her workshop sits 540 kilometres from the capital. She has no website, no Instagram account, no presence on any platform a European buyer would ever find. Yet her products have a path to shelves in Berlin — not because she built it, but because fourteen other women she had never met decided that the only way out of a 95% import market was to stop competing and start sharing a brand name none of them had invented.

Since they're rivals, there were challenges — hiding information, refusing to assist, quarreling over competition.

The brand is called “Out of the Green” — a name whose origin its creators never publicly explained, though it nods toward Mongolia’s “green label” identity for natural products. The story behind it is the most ambitious collective export experiment in Central Asia’s beauty industry — and the first time all fifteen members have been identified in English.

The quarrel before the coalition

On November 1, 2018, approximately 200 representatives from Mongolia’s cosmetics industry gathered at the Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MNCCI) in Ulaanbaatar (Улаанбаатар). The event was a “Cooperation Day” organised by the EU-funded Trade Related Assistance for Mongolia (TRAM) project — a four-year, €4.5 million initiative that had identified organic cosmetics as one of four Mongolian export sectors with genuine potential alongside sea buckthorn, eco-textiles, and leather.

The idea was simple: get competitors into the same room. The execution was anything but.

Battsetseg Chagdgaa (Ч.Батцэцэг), the founder of skincare brand Gilgerem (Гилгэрэм) and a trained English teacher, had spent two years watching Mongolia’s cosmetics makers operate in isolation. Each company guarded its formulas, its supplier relationships, its customer base. “Since they’re rivals within the same industry, there were a lot of challenges,” she later told Global Press Journal, “such as hiding information from one another, refusing to assist each other, and quarreling over unfair market competition.”

The quarrelling had a rational basis. Mongolia’s entire cosmetics market is worth roughly 200 billion MNT ($58 million), and over 95% of it belongs to imports. The domestic producers — some forty authorised manufacturers — fight over the remaining sliver. In a market that small, every customer your rival wins is a customer you lose.

But TRAM’s senior expert, Carl Krug, saw something the individual companies could not: that the real competitor was not the soap maker across town but the French and German brands that controlled 95% of the market. His diagnosis was structural. No single Mongolian cosmetics brand had the scale, the capital, the regulatory expertise, or the market knowledge to access European buyers independently. EU product registration costs €1,500 per item — roughly 5 million MNT. For micro-enterprises with annual revenues below $30,000, that single fee was a wall.

Krug’s proposal was a “triple helix” model — private companies, government bodies, and research institutions at the same table. Not the traditional business association suited for domestic trade, but a coalition built specifically for international market entry.

Four months of follow-up meetings, arguments, and negotiations followed. In early 2019, fifteen companies adopted a charter and formally registered as the Mongolia Cosmetics Cluster NGO (Монголын Байгалийн Гаралтай Гоо Сайхны Бүтээгдэхүүний Кластер ТББ). Battsetseg was elected Board Chair — the only governance position publicly documented. Thirteen manufacturers and two raw material suppliers had agreed to stop quarrelling long enough to build something none of them could build alone.

The €1,500 door

The cluster’s first challenge was existential: how do you sell Mongolian cosmetics in a market that has never heard of them?

The answer was counterintuitive. “Being unsuccessful in the domestic market doesn’t mean you can’t go abroad,” Battsetseg told Business.MN in 2021. The logic was brutal. If 95% of your home market is captured by imports that enter at low tariffs with virtually no safety regulation, competing domestically is a war of attrition against brands with deeper pockets and established distribution. But European consumers were actively seeking natural, organic, ethically sourced alternatives — exactly what Mongolian producers offered.

The barrier was regulatory, not commercial. The EU Cosmetics Regulation (EC 1223/2009) requires formal product registration before any cosmetic can be sold in Europe. At €1,500 per product, a brand with twenty SKUs faces €30,000 just to enter the market — before a single unit ships. For companies that the UNDP estimates earn less than $30,000 annually, that arithmetic is impossible.

The cluster’s solution was collective infrastructure. Rather than running “separate marketing campaigns for each brand, unknown to the European market and some of which are very hard to pronounce,” as Krug explained, the fifteen companies would sell under a single export-only brand: “Out of the Green.” Not a certification label, not a master brand with sub-brands — a shared marketing identity that eliminated the need for fifteen individual market entry campaigns.

The key ingredients across the portfolio told a distinctly Mongolian story: sea buckthorn oil from the steppes, Siberian cedar nut oil from the northern taiga, camel milk from Gobi herders, sheep tail fat rendered by nomadic families, and mare milk from horseback cultures stretching back millennia.

TRAM delivered the technical foundation: GMP training led by Monos Cosmetics’ chief technologist, the introduction of ISO 16128 standards for organic cosmetic ingredients, and submission of those standards to Mongolia’s Agency for Standard and Metrology for national authorisation. The cluster collectively registered ninety-five companies in the EU REX (Registered Exporter) system, securing access to GSP+ preferential tariffs that allow duty-free export of over 7,200 Mongolian product types to the EU.

Then came the breakthrough that made the coalition real.

Helen Made LLC (Хээлэн Мэйд ХХК), a founding cluster member that produces felt-covered soaps from sheep tail fat tallow, pushed its Myangat soap through the full EU registration process. It became the first Mongolian cosmetic product officially registered in the European Union. The €1,500 door that no individual brand could afford to open had been opened — and the path through it now existed for everyone behind.

A store in the Nikolaiviertel

The infrastructure that followed was physical, not just regulatory.

In Berlin’s historic Nikolaiviertel district, at Am Nussbaum 8, a storefront opened circa 2019-2020 under the “Mongolian Green Labels” banner — a broader national umbrella brand covering green products from multiple sectors. The store is operated by IHZ-Mongolei GmbH, a company founded by Mongolian nationals in Germany. It remains open Monday through Saturday, 11:00 to 19:00.

On its shelves: Helen Made’s Myangat felted soaps. A Camel Milk Ghee All-Purpose Balm priced at €25. Products from cluster members whose names — Gilgerem, KHALGAI, LaPerla — no German consumer had ever encountered before.

In February 2021, the e-commerce platform at mongolian-green-labels.eu went live, extending the physical presence to all EU member states. The cluster now had a retail storefront, an online channel, and more than twenty products in the European pipeline.

A second store opened in Freiburg in 2024, run by a “Kulturzentrum Mongolei.” That same year, the cluster mounted a 100-square-metre “Mongolian Green Labels Country Pavilion” at the Bazaar Berlin trade fair. Two years earlier, they had exhibited at Cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna — the global cosmetics industry’s premier trade show — with a Mongolia country pavilion.

For fifteen micro-enterprises from a landlocked country of 3.4 million people, the trajectory was clear: from quarrelling rivals in a MNCCI conference room to a country pavilion at Cosmoprof in four years.

The woman who left and the woman who arrived

The cluster’s most improbable dynamic sits in the contrast between its architect and its newest recruit.

Battsetseg Chagdgaa, the Board Chair who unified fifteen competitors, eventually left Ulaanbaatar entirely. In 2018, her two-year-old daughter Setsen Unenbat fell ill during one of the capital’s catastrophic air pollution episodes — the same pollution that Gilgerem’s products were designed to protect against. “In Ulaanbaatar, it was very difficult for kids to breathe,” she told AFP. “My only desire was to raise my kid in a healthy environment.”

She posted her plans on social media. Four hundred people responded, wanting to join her exodus. By 2021, she had moved to Khantai village in Bulgan province, along the Eg River, where she learned to fetch water from a well, plow fields, and light a stove. The woman who built Mongolia’s cosmetics export coalition now herds goats and keeps bees — though reporting by Global Press Journal suggests she continues to manage her Ulaanbaatar businesses remotely.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tuuvee Dash (Д.Түүвээ) arrived in the cluster from the opposite direction. A beautician in Dalanzadgad who had opened a yoga centre in 2018, she watched it die when Mongolia enacted one of the world’s earliest border closures in January 2020. Rather than wait, she looked at what surrounded her — Bactrian camels, sheep flocks, wild thyme, a desert plant called tsulkhir that grows nowhere else — and pivoted to cosmetics.

Her raw material supplier is a herder named Munkhzul Chuluun (Мунхзул Чулуун), who lives in Noyon soum — a settlement of 1,300 people, 216 kilometres from Dalanzadgad and 800 kilometres from Ulaanbaatar, on the Chinese border. Munkhzul’s family roasts camel milk into powder and rubs it on their faces, a practice so old no one remembers when it started. “It’s something to be proud of,” he told Global Press Journal, “that local companies make beauty products out of camel milk and sell them to the world.”

Gobi Goo (Говь Гоо) joined the cluster in September 2020 — the first member from outside Ulaanbaatar. A beautician in the Gobi Desert became part of a coalition that gave her access to European infrastructure she could never have built alone, while bringing the cluster something it had lacked: a supply chain rooted in the very landscape that makes Mongolian cosmetics unique.

The giant at the table

The cluster’s membership creates one structural tension that defies easy categorisation.

Monos Cosmetics LLC (Монос Косметик ХХК), a founding member, is no micro-enterprise. Established in 1990 with over 2,500 employees, Monos built Mongolia’s largest cosmetics factory in 2021. It sits at the table alongside sole proprietors crafting soaps in kitchen workshops with fewer than ten staff. But in a 95% import market, the real threat is not the domestic rival but the structural invisibility of all Mongolian brands in international markets.

The relationship is symbiotic rather than predatory. Monos contributed institutional expertise — its chief technologist led the GMP training that taught smaller members manufacturing standards. Its factory-scale production provided practical knowledge that artisanal producers needed. In return, Monos gained collective bargaining power and shared export infrastructure for EU market entry — capabilities that even a 2,500-person company cannot efficiently build alone from a landlocked Central Asian capital.

The dynamic mirrors what economists call “coopetition” — competitors cooperating where individual action fails. Monos understands this calculus: scale without market access is just capacity.

What survived when the funding stopped

TRAM ended in July 2021. The cluster’s own website domain — mongoliancosmetics.com — lapsed and is now parked for sale at $6,195. On paper, the institutional scaffolding should have collapsed.

It did not.

In September 2021, MNCCI and five non-mining export clusters formed the Mongolian Export Cluster Network (MECN) NGO, an umbrella organisation providing ongoing coordination. Three months later, a workshop on “Improving the Export of Mongolian Cosmetics Products to the EU” drew twenty-five representatives from cluster member organisations. EU Delegation project manager M. Byambaragchaa signalled plans for a successor programme.

That programme materialised as the EU International Trade Development in Mongolia (ITDM) project — €3.8 million, implemented by GOPA Group, running from June 2023 through June 2027. ITDM explicitly supports the four original TRAM export clusters with three components: trade policy, SME export capacity, and cluster development.

The four-year runway matters. Mongolia’s GSP+ preferential tariff access to the EU runs through 2027 — the same window as ITDM. The question is whether the cluster can achieve self-sustainability through member fees, export commissions, or Mongolian Green Labels retail revenue before the external funding ends.

Meanwhile, the pipeline is slowly widening. ENARU (Инару), a cluster member founded in 2016, achieved CPNP (Cosmetic Products Notification Portal) registration for its Horse Essence Skin Balm — the second confirmed EU notification after Helen Made. As of September 2021, five additional brands were working on EU export approval: Lhamour (Лхамур), Gilgerem, ENARU, Khaitans (Хайтанс), and Uulen Savan (Үүлэн Саван).

The oldest company at the table — MonCream LLC (Монкрем ХХК), founded in 1989 by Doctor Una, a Soviet-trained chemist who built Mongolia’s first private cosmetics company with three employees and a food-grade mixing machine — represents a different kind of proof. MonCream survived the collapse of socialism, 268% inflation, and periods of zero revenue by stripping back to a single nettle shampoo. If any Mongolian cosmetics brand understands what it takes to outlast structural impossibility, it is the one that has been doing it for thirty-seven years.

But survival is an abstraction until you see who survived.

Fifteen names in English for the first time

The complete roster of the Mongolia Cosmetics Cluster — all fifteen members who participated in the September 2020 Ulaanbaatar Partnership expo — has never been published in English until now. Some are published Brandmine profiles. Others are Facebook-only operations whose names had never appeared outside Mongolian Cyrillic.

The founding members: Gilgerem (board chair), MonCream/KHALGAI, Lhamour, Monos Cosmetics, Helen Made, LaPerla, Nomadic Beaumn, Uulen Savan (Cloud Soap), and Spirit of Nature. The newer additions: ENARU, Dr. Baatar Brand, Gobi Goo, and Gerelty Organics. The raw material suppliers: Huba Haya (KhaanJims Company), an ISO 22000-certified sea buckthorn processor exporting to five countries, and Galaariidii Galindev, who remains unverifiable — likely a sole proprietor whose name yielded zero results in any language.

Nine of the fifteen have minimal or no web presence beyond Facebook pages in Mongolian Cyrillic. This is not a failure of marketing — it is the fundamental condition the cluster exists to solve. “Out of the Green” exists precisely because these brands cannot reach European consumers alone. Not just because of regulatory barriers, but because of the basic invisibility of micro-enterprises operating in a script that Western search engines barely index.

What fifteen rivals proved

The Mongolia Cosmetics Cluster’s achievement is not commercial scale — most members still earn less than $30,000 annually. It is institutional proof.

Proof that fifteen competitors in a market worth less than $60 million can stop quarrelling long enough to build shared infrastructure. Proof that the €1,500-per-product EU registration barrier can be overcome collectively when it cannot be overcome individually. Proof that a country with no cosmetics safety law, no modern testing laboratories, and 95% import dominance can still place products on European shelves — if the brands are willing to subordinate their individual identities to a collective one.

The €3.8 million ITDM project provides a runway through June 2027. Two stores in Germany provide retail presence. Over twenty products are in the EU pipeline. The question is no longer whether Mongolian cosmetics can reach Europe — Helen Made’s felt soap already answered that. The question is whether a decade of EU investment has built a permanent export channel or a well-intentioned pilot that ends when the funding does.

In Dalanzadgad, 540 kilometres from the capital, Tuuvee Dash is still making soap from camel milk. In Khantai village, 500 kilometres in the opposite direction, Battsetseg Chagdgaa is herding goats and managing a cosmetics coalition remotely. In Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel, their products share a shelf — two women who have never met, from opposite edges of a vast country, connected by a collective brand that exists because neither could reach that shelf alone.

That is what “Out of the Green” means. Not a marketing slogan — a survival strategy.

Six of the fifteen cluster brands — Gobi Goo, Gilgerem, Lhamour, MonCream, Helen Made, and LaPerla — are documented on Brandmine with founder profiles, growth signal analysis, and trilingual coverage in English, Russian, and Chinese. Explore their stories at brandmine.ai.

Last updated: March 15, 2026