Our Story
Made by hand in Wicklow. Botanicals foraged from the Irish coastline and hills. Three generations of women who knew their plants — and forty years of chemistry behind every formula.
There is a soap bar in our house that is forty years old. It was made by my grandmother, Stanka, in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria — lard, lye, and whatever she had to hand. It has never been used. It sits exactly as she left it, and it is still intact.
My mother, Darina, kept it. She keeps most things that matter.
To understand MAMO, you have to go back to a village called Petkovo, high in the Rhodopes, where Darina spent her summers as a child. Her grandparents — Ivanka and Vasil — had very little by most measures. There were no roads connecting Petkovo to the nearest city. Vasil walked three days through the mountains on foot to get to work. There was no hospital nearby, no pharmacy. What the village needed, the village made.
What Ivanka and Vasil had was a garden. Fruit trees, vegetables, herbs. What the garden didn't cover, they foraged — wild fruits, edible herbs, sorrel and nettle pulled from the hillsides and made into soup with lemon and rice, which became one of Darina's favourite meals and which she still makes. Meat and milk came from neighbours, exchanged for vegetables or for help with the house. Darina spent those summers helping Vasil repair the mountain cottage and walking out into the hills every morning with Ivanka, her mother, and her aunt — a group of women who knew exactly which plants were worth stopping for. Ivanka taught Darina how to make herbal infusions, how to make balms and creams from what grew around them, how to look at a hillside and see not just plants but ingredients. When there was no pharmacy, you learned this. It was not a lifestyle. It was how you looked after your family.
Darina grew up, studied food engineering, and when cosmetic science followed it felt like the most natural next step — because she had been learning the underlying logic of it since she was small. Her own mother, Stanka, taught her to make soap later. In a pink basin on the floor, the old way. No measurements that anyone wrote down. No formula. Just the knowledge that had always been in the family, passed from one pair of hands to the next.
I was in Petkovo last summer. Nobody lives in the house anymore. There were a few woollen blankets, old plates, the fireplace. And the pink basin — still there, in the corner, exactly where it always was.
I stood in that room and thought about how much I wish I could go back and ask all of them so many questions. I was too young to know what I didn't know yet.
The garden Darina has built in Wicklow is the continuation of something that started in Petkovo. It is not a perfect garden — she did not grow up with perfect, she grew up with wild and real, and the garden shows it. But she tends it the way Ivanka tended hers — carefully, without fuss, because the garden was never decorative. It was always for something. The calendula, chamomile, lavender, and rosemary that go into the products grow there. What the garden doesn't provide, we forage — along the Murrough, around Glen Strand and Wicklow Head, through Tinakelly and Murragh and up along Carrick Mountain. Yarrow, horsetail, nettle, seaweed. Gathered by hand, steeped into teas, infused slowly into oils before they ever reach a formula.
I am Geri. Darina is my mother. I grew up following those women through the mountains every summer — before breakfast, before the day had properly started, a group of them walking slowly and knowing exactly what they were looking for, and me at the back trying to keep up. I didn't understand then that I was being taught something. I understand now, and I wish I had asked more questions while I still could.
I lead the brand, the communications, and the commercial direction of MAMO. I do the foraging, develop the product strategy, and spend a lot of time thinking about what people actually need from the things they put on their skin — and how those needs change.
My brother Niko handles everything else that needs building, fixing, or making from scratch — the wooden moulds we pour the soaps into, the cutting and slicing machines, the custom production tools, the display structures. The things my mother and I regularly break, he fixes. The three of us make everything in small batches in our studio in Wicklow.
Darina has over forty years of experience in food engineering and cosmetic science. Every MAMO formulation is her work — CPSR-certified, built from ingredients worth saying out loud, free from synthetic fragrances, parabens, and harsh detergents. The science is serious and it is hers. But the instinct that shaped it is older — it comes from Ivanka's garden in Petkovo, from learning that when there is no pharmacy you had better know your plants, from a group of women walking slowly through the Rhodope Mountains picking what they knew was worth keeping.
The name MAMO comes from the Bulgarian word мамо — how you call out to your mother when you need her. It echoes the Irish word mamó, which means grandmother. We named the brand for the most important person in it. We could not decide which one, so we named it for both.
That forty-year-old soap bar sits in our house, still intact. Stanka made it before I was born. We would like to think our products carry something of the same quality — not just in what they're made from, but in what it means to have been made this carefully, by people who have been learning how to do this for a very long time.
— Geri
Supported By: MAMO is honoured to be supported by organisations that value the heritage of Irish craft:
