The Quality Makers: Shizu Okusa of Apothékary
Photo by Apothékary: Founder, Shizu Okusa
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Welcome to The Quality Makers, an interview series highlighting pioneers in the direct-to-consumer space. Join us as we get an inside look at the world of digital shopping through the eyes of the individuals shaping it…
Shizu Okusa worked on Wall Street for many years. Yet like all of us who have experienced a moment of burnout, after leaving an intense finance career, she became inspired to live a more balanced lifestyle. It was then that she revisited her Japanese roots and passion for herbal medicine, and decided to help others regain their holistic health using traditions she grew up with (and a few others she learned along the way.) Now, she proudly leads Apothékary with the intention of delivering natural herbal remedies that get to the root cause of health issues rather than masking the symptoms.
As a huge fan of the brand, and of Okusa's story, I was delighted to have the chance to hear all about her process and lessons learned along the way. See below for the transcript of our interview.
If you were to explain Apothékary to someone that has no idea what it is, what would you say?
The simplest way to describe Apothékary is really that it's Mother Nature's Farmacy. We’ve created a platform and a safe space for people to find a natural remedy for all of their woes. We bridge the Eastern world of herbal medicine with Western/modern-day ailments; from mental health concerns, from COVID, and everything in between. Apothékary lies at the intersection between healthcare, beauty, and food and wellness, all together in one.
What led you to start Apothékary? When did you become interested in medicine as nature?
I was born and raised on a farm. My parents fled Japan after World War II and came to Canada with nothing. They actually met through the Japanese community in Vancouver, because there's a ton of immigrants and refugees there. They have this beautiful love story where my mom was the richer one with a house and my dad was a plumber and a milk cow farmer. They got married, had my oldest sister and I, and we ended up moving to a larger farm where we live today. I actually own it now. It's a 20 acre farm right outside of Vancouver, in a place called Surrey, and we grow pears, tomatoes, cucumbers and apples and have chickens and eggs and lots more, though it's become a community farm now that my parents are retired. There's a Facebook community where my dad posts “U Pick, Sunday 10am, Nashi”, which means "pear" in Japanese, and we'll just have crowds of people come in and pick whatever they want.
So I grew up in that kind of mindset. I was always around nature, but of course we made no money off it, so my parents encouraged us to go into business or become a doctor. Whatever Asian stereotype you can think of. I chose business because I thought that's what I wanted. I thought I would pursue the biggest and the best, so that's what I set out to do when I went to UBC Vancouver. I managed to get my first job at Goldman Sachs, right after college, and I had the best 2-3 years of my life learning a ton and soaking in so much from business practices, to teamwork, to office culture and more. But ultimately I realized how disconnected I was from my own natural self. I really needed a break, so I just quit cold turkey, which I feel like can be one of the best ways to reinvent yourself.
I was really focused on my resume virtues for the better half of my life, and now I’m focused more on what I call the eulogy virtues, which is how I want to be remembered when I die. Thinking about how I want my story to ultimately be shared is dependent on how I spend my every day. I knew that would be a continuation of my parents and their maker. So I moved to Mozambique for about a year, where I was working on a banana farm, helping farmers raise capital for small hole projects and tractors. And then I lived in Bali for three months learning about Ayurvedic medicine, and that’s really where my journey as a wellness entrepreneur began.
How has your ethnic background aided you in collecting all the wisdom needed to found this space?
I grew up with an "eat what you grow, grow what you eat" kind of mentality, and we never really went to a pharmacy to get medication. Of course that brings about other potentially problematic things like my parents self-diagnosing me if I had a fever, which is why I so strongly believe that there should be a marriage between Western and Eastern medicine. But there’s a larger conversation to be had around preventative health, because today in the Western world, we're only talking about reactionary health. I grew up drinking a ton of lemon, orange and ginger juice, and when my parents put me into swimming and tennis classes, I never had energy drinks, so they’d brew Reishi and Rhodiola drinks for months on end in these clay pots. The conversation was always focused on which herbs are good for what and they got all that information from their parents or their ancestors.
What products do you offer and how are they tailored to each individual's specific needs?
We currently have about 40 different SKUs. We go from single herbs like Maca ($39), Ashwagandha ($39), Shatavari ($39), and Tulsi ($39), all the way to our signature formulas like Mind Over Matter ($45) and Seal The Deal ($45), which are the ones that contain four to seven different herbal ingredients. Then we also have our tinctures, which are relatively new. Our bestseller Take The Edge Off ($39), for stress relief, has sold out 3 times, and we just launched our second one for mood and skin support called Rosé-Tinted Glasses ($39), which is also doing super well. Both of them are positioned in a way where they’re stress treatments, yes, but they can also act as alcohol alternatives. We’ve never claimed that they taste exactly like wine, but we’ve noticed that for most of our customers it’s actually much more about the feeling.
What are the benefits of drinking your herbs rather than taking them in pill form?
We used to say "plants over pills" and we no longer use that statement, mainly because there are Western day drugs and prescriptions that you should take in pill form because you can't get their effects as potently in any other form. That being said, in the world of supplements, there are so many companies out there where a lot of questions have been raised about how healthy their capsules are for your digestive system. If they’re not organic, then they’re probably plastic. Whenever I need to take a pill, I either forget to do it or I don't really enjoy the process.
And so here we are, back at the importance of feeling. There's an actual routine and ritual that comes about from mixing your powders and in that process, asking yourself: how am I feeling today? With our powders, you learn the use and importance of each one, and in that way we’re able to give support to and control back to the customer. We try to make Mother Nature more accessible, a little bit more fun and a little bit more feel-good.
How does Apothékary aid you in figuring out what’s right for you and what you need at any given moment?
We do have a quiz on our site. But unlike every other quiz, we typically rotate those questions every quarter because it's really important that we take seasonality into account. Or if someone's on a subscription, which a third of our community is, we make sure that they switch things up after taking something like Chill The F* Out ($45) for six months straight, because our bodies get used to the supplements we take.
There’s also the possibility of speaking to an educator or a herbalist in house, who provide 30-45 min consultation sessions. People can book that any day of the week. And then we also offer quarterly classes, partnering with an herbalist named Rachelle Robinett, who's one of the best names in the business.
What are some lessons you aim to teach others about health/wellness and thus self care?
I could write a book on this. First and foremost, everyone is different. Everyone's health and bodies are different. And we need to try our best to move away from comparison. I believe in giving yourself the grace and the space to really get intimate with what your needs are and be proactive about that. Secondly, and this has really helped me with stress management over the years, is locking my phone away on Friday nights and picking it up again on Sunday afternoons. My weekends are where I start to carve out "me time" and I encourage my whole team to do that as well. When you’re growing a business, you get so much inbound, and you feel like you have to respond immediately. But you really don’t. And this method allows me to just remember my worth.
What would you say differentiates you from other brands in the industry?
We really lean into the world of herbalism and plant medicine in a way that embraces multiplicity. We want to be here for your entire daily ritual, and so we position ourselves in someone's life in a way that works for them. What makes us unique is our breadth and depth of product.
We also envision a future built on longevity. I want to build a brand that lasts for hundreds of years. Nature as medicine will live on forever — whether it's a walk in the park or in the forest, taking herbs or putting some plants into your room. My goal is that this business is set up for success, for decades and decades to come.
What is your vision for the future of Apothékary?
We want to go global, but I actually really want to go East. We've started in the West and it’s sad to me that we're bringing in organic herbs from Asia, without giving back to that community yet. We had to build our own supply chain because the materials don't exist here at the scale and volume we need in order to build a business. But I actually would love to see a world where we're manufacturing in Japan and then we could sell it in Asia. We have to remember that that’s where this all began.