Carrie Armstrong has been preparing for her jump to entrepreneurship her whole life.
“I worked in all areas of cosmetics — from sales to salon supplies to department stores — and couldn’t help but notice the lack of representation of Indigenous products,” says Armstrong, who founded Mother Earth Essentials in 2006.
The idea for her company had been percolating for years before that. Armstrong traces it back to her childhood. Growing up next door to her Cree grandmother, Armstrong watched her work with herbs in the kitchen, teaching Armstrong about traditional medicines. On walks, her grandmother would tell her about the different properties of plants and their everyday uses.
After leaving her career in cosmetics to return to university to study education, Armstrong found a job at amiskwaciy Academy, the central Edmonton Indigenous public high school. There, she found inspiration working with students in the school’s garden. That experience, coupled with her time in the cosmetics industry, pushed her to finally launch her own brand of beauty products — made from the herbs and medicines she grew up with.
First focussing on soaps and teas, Mother Earth Essentials has since expanded to offer candles, aromatherapy sprays, essential oils and skin care products. Drawing inspiration from the medicine wheel components for their earliest products — cedar, sweetgrass, sage and tobacco — the company now offers a variety of scents, still with a focus on local ingredients and scents, creating everything from juniper soap and wild rose cranberry candles.
The products at Mother Earth Essentials are not only made from natural, sustainable ingredients — they are an invitation for customers to discover Indigenous teaching and reconnect with the natural world, through their products as well as Armstrong’s book and workshops.
“When I do workshops I get to tell people, ‘That plant growing between the sidewalk cracks, this is what it does,’” Armstrong says. “I love the reaction. People are like, ‘What? I thought that was just a weed.’
Today, Mother Earth Essentials products are found in retail stores and hotels across Canada, as well as their own online shop. Recently, they created a massage oil for the Fairmont Banff Springs hotel, with ingredients from the area, including black spruce and winter green.
Even as the company has expanded, opening their new retail location on Jasper Ave this year, Armstrong still loves the process of creating the products and experimenting with scents — and keeping the products affordable and high quality.
“The main (goal) is doing things in a respectful way around culture,” she adds. “I am not a medicine person and I’m not pretending to be. There are spiritual components to plants that I don’t know. I would like to know one day, but that’s for our Elders and our medicine people. And I always encourage people to learn about that piece.”
Mother Earth Essentials
Downtown | 9797 Jasper Ave, Edmonton | motherearth.ca
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