Baltic States – CIS, EU – Baltic States, Good for Business, Latvia, Markets and Companies

"The fact is we lost the Ukrainian market – they stopped buying our cosmetic products and retail chains stopped stocking our products, because they're Russian goods. We lost a market of 50 million people which accounted for 15-20 percent of our turnover. And so we decided to launch a plant in Estonia and enter Ukraine anew through Estonia. We've already started deliveries to Ukraine, our cosmetics are now labeled 'Made in Estonia'," founder of the company Andrei Trubnikov told Russian business newspaper RBK.

"We'll enter Poland also through Estonia because the attitude towards us is fairly negative in Poland as well, it's a legacy of history," he added.

The company is producing in Estonia not its brand Natura Siberica which is more widely known in Europe but Natura Estonica. "It's a different product. Natura Estonica costs one third of what Natura Siberica costs. It's less organic, it's a mass product," Trubnikov explained.

"We added Estonian camomile to Natura Estonica to show we love Estonia, to make them happy. /.../ We met with the Estonian ambassador, I told him we have a common road, after all. You are building an organic state, we're making organic cosmetics," Trubnikov said.

Natura Siberica has a subsidiary called Eurobio Lab in Estonia. It was established at the beginning of 2014 and the parent company invested 3.9 million euros in it that year. The company produced the first trial batch at the end of the year and sold a part of it in December. One of the major investments was the acquisition of the historic Tolluste manor on Saaremaa Island.