Barb Stegemann Is on a Mission to Make the World a Better Place—And Beauty Products Are Her Weapon of Choice

Scents Sensibility& Barb Stegemann is on a mission to make the world a better place—and beauty products are her weapon of choice BY STEPHEN KIMBER “THREE THOUSAND GOURDE,” the porter said. “For your check-in.” It was November 2016, and Barb Stegemann (a high-energy motivational speaker, author of The 7 Virtues of a Philosopher Queen and president and CEO of The 7 Virtues Beauty Inc., a Halifax-based fragrance company with a global social entrepreneurial mission) was standing at the American Airlines check-in counter at the airport in Port au Prince. She’d traveled to Haiti to meet with local essential oils suppliers, as well as to volunteer in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Matthew, which had ripped through that incredibly poor, hard-luck country that was then still reeling—and still far from recovered—after a massive 2010 earthquake. It was that earthquake (which killed more than 250,000 Haitians, displaced 1.5 million more and damaged or destroyed close to 4,000 schools) that had brought Stegemann to Haiti in the first place. Having already made a name for herself by creating perfumes sourced from fair trade suppliers in Afghanistan in order to goose that war-ravaged country’s legal economic development, Stegemann was the only Canadian invited to join a Clinton Foundation post-earthquake recovery trade mission to Haiti in 2012. That mission led to the launch—appropriately on United Nations International Day of Peace—of Vetiver of Haiti, a perfume made from an essential oil Stegemann had purchased there. On this buying-volunteering trip, however, she’d encountered one of the realities often faced by those who want to bring social change to war- and-disaster plagued countries: endemic corruption. The day before she’d arrived, she’d been told a Norwegian relief vessel filled with supplies had been forced to turn away because local officials demanded “impossibly high bribes” the ship’s owners could not pay. 48 | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 Scents Sensibility 48 | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 ATLANTICBUSINESSMAGAZINE.COM | 49 BARB STEGEMANN And now, admittedly on a much smaller scale, Stegemann Ah, yes, the journalist part of Barb Stegemann. Which could herself was smacking up against the same dilemma. While in still lead who knows where. Haiti, she’d bought a large box of shea butter and natural oils In 1999, she graduated from the journalism school where I as a way to support the local women who’d produced it. At the teach and, while she did not spend much of her career in the airport on her way back to Halifax, she’d tipped the porter $15 traditional journalism trenches, she clearly learned a thing or USD to carry the box from the cab to the ticket counter. But two. “I learned to get on the phone, to make cold calls, interview, before he got there, he’d handed it over to another porter, who’d research, communicate.” ferried it up to the American Airlines counter and instructed She also learned the importance of stories, and how to tell Stegemann to wait at the end of a long line. Less than a minute them. She learned very well. later, Stegemann recalls, “he came back and brought me to the Barb Stegemann’s life, in fact, unfolds as a series of airline agent at the kiosk and told me she would check me in. I disconnected but interconnected narratives that, taken together, felt relieved.” create a remarkable hang-together story, one that is still Until, that is, she’d been checked in and realized the porter unfolding. was now insisting she also needed to pay another 3,000 Haitian Gourde (about $45 USD) to the agent for the speedy check- BARB STEGEMANN WAS BORN in 1969 in Pointe Claire, Quebec, in. Stegemann explained she’d already paid the other porter, a largely English-speaking Montreal suburb, at a time and in then said she had no more cash on her. Unabashed, the airline a place where being unilingual English had ceased to be an agent escorted Stegemann to a bank machine advantage. When she was eight, her parents outside the airport so she could withdraw moved Barb and her sister to her mother’s the money, which the agent then slipped into home province of Nova Scotia. It didn’t her pocket before walking Stegemann back I was making real money go well. Her parents split up. “My mother through security. suffered from misdiagnosed mental health When Stegemann got back to Canada, for the first“ time in my life. issues,” Stegemann says now, “and I think that she called American Airlines to complain. was the breaking point with Dad.” Officials apologized and refunded her money. I learned about economic As a result, Barb spent her formative But “that’s not the point,” Stegemann tells me development, and I learned teenaged years living with her mother and today. “I don’t care about the $45.” What she sister in a trailer near Antigonish. Even then, does care about is the casual corruption she from risk-takers. she says, her mother “wasn’t present. The encountered, the kind that discourages those neighbours fed us.” In school, she was bullied. who want to help. “Perhaps corruption will end,” she muses, Her 11-month-older sister, Marjorie (now the program “when North American airlines and every company working in manager at the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute) Haiti refuse to participate in bribes.” helped “break the cycle” by heading off to Dalhousie University It can be done, she says. Consider Rwanda, the genocide- after high school. “I used to visit her,” Stegemann says, “and I blighted country where Stegemann also sources essential oils remember, on one of my visits, seeing this place on the campus. for perfumes. “When I visited Rwanda, the fastest growing and ‘What is that?’ It was [the University of] King’s [College]. I safest country in Africa, they had a billboard, interestingly just knew right away I had to go there.” before the airport that said, ‘If you see corruption, you are safe. During her first week of her first degree on King’s postage- Please report it.’” stamp-corner of the much larger Dalhousie campus in September As we talk, it is clear Barb Stegemann is already “ramping 1987, she met the man who would change her life. Trevor up” her rant on the issue of corruption. “It’s my new obsession,” Greene was a fourth-year journalism student: tall, blonde, she jokes. “That’s the journalist part of me.” athletic, popular, smart, with a passionate interest in the world 50 | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 BARB STEGEMANN around him. By contrast, Barb thought of herself as the poor, tells me now. “I leaned over to the girl beside me and said, ‘Uh- under-educated kid from the country. For reasons that don’t oh. I already have a kid and a full-time job.’” She managed to make sense and probably don’t matter, they almost instantly manage jobs, a kid and journalism—and do it all quite nicely. became soul mates. Just as she now found a way to navigate the new reality of Their relationship was never romantic (“we were more her second pregnancy. “My boyfriend at the time said, ‘the party like brother and sister”) but it was as intense as any romantic has to continue.’ I told him it didn’t.” Instead, in the late fall of relationship. She and “Bubba,” as he was known around campus, 1999, she and her son Victor moved to the west coast where her rowed together on the university’s rowing team. Greene, who’d ex-husband lived, and she gave birth to her daughter Ella there. already volunteered with Ethiopia Airlift and World University “It was the fairy tale divorce,” she laughs. “My ex lived down Service of Canada, introduced her to David Wilson. Wilson in the hall,” and they co-parented. “It worked for a while.” Long turn introduced her to Peter Dalglish, a Dalhousie law grad who enough. specialized in international humanitarian causes (he and Wilson After a brief, unhappy stint working for a syndicated TV show, would later co-found Street Kids International). She began to however, Stegemann found herself applying for a call centre job imagine a larger world beyond that tiny campus. Even after just to make ends meet. While she waited for her telephone job Greene graduated and went off to Japan at the end of her first interview (“they kept me waiting for 45 minutes”), she randomly year, they stayed in close touch and she picked up on his interest Googled “self-employment” and up popped information on an in the world. entrepreneurial education program at nearby Douglas College, After her own graduation three years later, which was designed to help people receiving Stegemann knew only what she didn’t want to employment insurance benefits—people like do: “sit in a cubicle, work in some nine-to-five her—create their own businesses. She applied… job.” She toyed with the idea of social work, Perhaps corruption will and the rest is the next chapter. but a volunteer stint at a local youth facility “By the time I graduated, I was doing (“one of my duties was to check behind the end when“ North American marketing for the college.” shower curtain to see if anyone had slit their airlines and every company In June 2000, she launched Acclimatize wrists”) quickly convinced her “that wasn’t Communications Corp., a boutique PR firm, me. I wasn’t strong enough to handle that kind working in Haiti refuse to and spent the next seven years “making real of work.” participate in bribes.

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