The Quality Makers: Shizu Okusa of Apothékary

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.