M. Gongorsuren

Studio lights were slowly destroying M. Gongorsuren’s (М.Гонгорсүрэн) skin. The heavy makeup required for television work left her increasingly sensitive, and nothing helped — not the expensive Korean serums, not the Japanese lotions. What she wanted, chemical-free organic skincare from ingredients Mongolians had trusted for centuries, did not exist.

In reality, it wasn't like that at all. Everything depends on you.

The journalist who saw the gap #

Gongorsuren’s path to founding Mongolia’s first organic beauty brand began not in a laboratory but in an interview studio. As a journalism student at the Radio and Television Development School and a working presenter at two national television channels, she spent her days talking to successful people across business, arts, and sport. What struck her was not their answers but a recurring pattern in their stories: each had created something that had not existed before them. “How wonderful it is,” she later reflected, “to have something to talk about, to have created something.”

The insight stayed with her as her own skin crisis deepened. Mongolia’s cosmetics market in 2014 was almost entirely imported — over ninety-five per cent of products came from South Korea, Japan, and Europe. For a consumer seeking organic skincare made from Mongolian ingredients, the options were zero. Not limited, not scarce — zero. Gongorsuren had grown up with the same traditional remedies every Mongolian family knew: sheep tail fat for skin conditions, thyme for hair loss, sea buckthorn oil for wounds. These were practices, she would later say, “tested over hundreds of years with proven results.” The question was not whether the ingredients worked. The question was whether anyone would build a brand around them.

Everything depends on you #

Still in her early twenties, she had no money, no business connections, and no cosmetics training. People told her “Монголд бизнес хийх хэцүү” — it is hard to do business in Mongolia. There was no government support, the market was too small, the competition from imports was insurmountable. Every piece of advice she received pointed in the same direction: do not try.

Gongorsuren tried anyway. She launched Goo in 2014, still a graduating journalism student, with zero investment capital and nothing but a social media presence. The name came from the Mongolian word for beauty — Гоо, from гоо сайхан — a term that encompasses not just appearance but physical and mental well-being. Close friends and colleagues would come to call her simply “Гоо.” Beauty.

The response was immediate and overwhelming. Five thousand bath bombs and exfoliators sold in the first ninety days through social media alone. The phone rang around the clock. She ran twenty-four-hour deliveries and still could not keep up. “Хэрвээ тэр үед сошиал медиа байгаагүй бол тэгж чадах байсан нь эргэлзээтэй,” she later told Unread Today — without social media, it is doubtful they could have done it. She had found her answer to the doubters. “Яг бодит байдал дээр ердөө ч тийм байгаагүй. Бүх зүйл чамаас л шалтгаална” — in reality, it was nothing like they said. Everything depends on you.

The cost of building too fast #

What the sales figures did not show was the price being paid behind them. In the early years, Gongorsuren’s obsessive work ethic — planning at night, constantly envisioning the future, unable to stop thinking about the next product — led to severe insomnia that progressively worsened. She acknowledges the trade-off with the clarity of someone who has made peace with it: if she had not worked that way, Goo could not have established its market position so quickly. The insomnia took a significant toll, but the brand’s survival demanded the pace she set.

The philosophical foundation that sustained her through those years came from an unexpected source. Gongorsuren is deeply influenced by Buddhist philosophy and traditional Mongolian wisdom. Her guiding principle comes from the Vajracchedika (Diamond Cutter) sutra: “Үйлийг чи үнэн хийвэл үр нь заавал ирнэ” — if you do the work truthfully, results will surely come. She studies astrology, draws inspiration from the poetry of R. Choinom, and channels her concern about alcoholism in Mongolia into developing a thyme tea designed to reduce cravings. The spiritual conviction is inseparable from the commercial execution: each product is personally created by Gongorsuren, each one intellectual-property-protected, each requiring a minimum of six months to develop. Over eighty per cent of Goo products carry the designation “Монголын анхны” — Mongolia’s first. All of them came from one mind.

The journalist who interviews founders #

The most revealing window into Gongorsuren’s character came in 2018 when she created “The Founder,” a television show in which she interviews Mongolia’s most successful entrepreneurs about their early struggles. The concept is pure journalism DNA applied to entrepreneurship: extract the real story, not the polished version. It is precisely the kind of show a founder who once sat behind a news desk would create — and precisely the kind of platform that reinforces brand credibility without ever mentioning a product.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, testing the resolve of every business owner in Mongolia, Gongorsuren’s response was consistent with everything in her biography. Fifty employees, eleven stores, no outside investors — and a pandemic that emptied every retail location she had built. She refused to cut a single salary. She refused to furlough anyone. She opened a new store, launched two new products, and hired two more people — all during the worst economic quarter in Mongolia’s recent history. Government-promised relief never materialised at the local level. The decision to expand rather than retreat made no financial sense. It made complete sense as character.

By 2026, the twenty-year-old journalism student with no money and no connections leads a company with nearly two hundred products, eleven stores, two spas, subsidiaries on three continents, and exports to six countries. Every formulation was created by her personally. No outside investment was ever accepted. The insomnia years have not ended — building something of this scale from a standing start in Mongolia is not a task that permits rest. But she built it the way her guiding sutra promised: truthfully, and the results came.

Last updated: March 15, 2026