Natural Products Canada 10th Anniversary Atlantic Summit
The turn of the decade accelerated a cultural shift toward reconnecting with natural, elemental resources. NGOs, such as Natural Products Canada (NPC), help early-stage Canadian founders access the advice, capital, and connections they need to meet their full commercial potential. Enthusiastic about the complexity of our extracts, which combine marine polysaccharides, antioxidant compounds, minerals, vitamins, and other water-soluble compounds in a single ingredient, NPC invited us to their 10th anniversary celebration.
Co-Founder Terrence Howell at NPC's 10th anniversary event
Trade shows are a stage, especially for a rural based company like 7 Fathoms, to showcase our products, disseminate the science powering seaweed, exchange stories and strategies, and to form partnerships supporting our growth and reach so our products can help more people. It’s another kind of surveying, another kind of harvesting.
Being on the road is an essential part of what we do. Let us take you behind the scenes of NPC’s 10th anniversary event to gain insight into a day in the life of a natural products company on the road.
Our Simple Approach to Connection
At these events we like to reenact the coastal experience, to bring the rugged, visceral, windswept shores of Newfoundland to the tradeshow floor. There’s always a bowl of seaweed, bladderwrack or laminiaria digitata, at our booth which we handle, squish, spread, and separate as a demonstration. Before viewers eyes sticky gossamer threads, which are simply thousands of microfilaments of pure seaweed extract, appear as we stretch our fingers and hands apart. Confronting the texture of the raw ingredient captivates an audience. When people learn the bioactives are in the gel it peaks their curiosity, they begin to wonder, and dare to experiment and touch the seaweed themselves. The sensation of the gel on their skin, how natural it feels, how fast it absorbs, provides empirical evidence of the quality of our extract. It’s a magic trick, an icebreaker, a simple way to connect with people.
Our extraction process inspired this demonstration. In the early days of development, we asked ourselves “what's the simplest, most effective way to make an extract as closely related to the raw as possible?” We took this philosophy about relatability from the processing room and adapted it to the showroom.
Sharing our Philosophy
Of everyone we meet, there’s a prevailing interest in our extraction process. We do whole aqueous extracts that protect the bioactive compounds perfected by nature. Humility is the first step to the extraction process. These extracts are already complex. To interfere with the compounds, isolate specific ones for a particular expression, would overcomplicate and ruin a master profile nature has refined over millennia. Research and development happens in the wild. Simplicity is the second step to the process. We don’t need to separate compounds, we need to protect the integrity of their natural composition.
That’s why our extract contains the same full spectrum of bioactives, the fucoidan, antioxidants, and marine polyphenols of brown seaweeds living in the North Atlantic. The formulas of our products only ever contain the minimal number of carrier ingredients necessary for the products’ composition. If possible, we always select natural carriers such as sunflower seed or hemp oil. Minimalist in form and design, made with functionality in mind, our products don’t allow for superfluous ingredients. That’s why every formula is fragrance-free.
The Evidence of Experience
Customer testimonials also vouch for the effectiveness of our products to restore the skin barrier. We’ve assembled a booklet telling the individual stories of our clients’ skincare journey. Several of them lay on the table of our booth for people to browse, each page relating the various ailments our clients have struggled against and how our products addressed their symptoms, restored their confidence, comfort, and balance to their daily lives. The recent rerun of our appearance on Dragon’s Den, where Terrence gave his personal account of first applying raw seaweed extract to his inflamed abdomen, how within a week it resolved years of chronic inflammation, has spread news of our origin story. We reiterate that fateful walk on the beach everywhere we go.
Networking and the Rural Advantage
Our dream is to expand the prevalence of natural ingredients, validate them, and make them more accessible. Those we met at NPC proves this is a shared dream. The creative seaweed products developers envision bringing to market encourages us, reinforces that 7 Fathoms is not alone on the edge of the world, but together with scientists and fellow founders on the cutting edge of the bioeconomy. Growing any business has its ebbs and flows. It’s educational and gives the future clarity to hear about challenges our peers face commercializing their products. At the same time, we have immense gratitude for our rural advantage. It set us down a route different from traditional pathways, building 7 Fathoms vertically from the ground up. Living on the door step of the natural resource, local knowledge about the marine environment, being in control of the extraction methodology, and solidifying institutional partners through our scientific advisor, Dr. Robert Helleur, let us enter the market while simultaneously researching, discovering, and advocating for the restorative properties of seaweed.
Made in Canada
While there is still a way to go for building the market infrastructure in Canada, we are fortunate to be a Canadian company. It’s a country that promotes biotechnology by supporting companies directly through the National Research Council or NGOs like NPC. All of them appreciate our work and have invited 7 Fathoms to collaborate with them. They understand us and we understand progress takes time. If we are patient, consistent in growing a national community, connecting the stories of our clients to those still struggling for a solution, we believe our dream to sell pure extract for applications on skin barrier trauma will come true.
