The Name Behind BPM: Indigenous Ownership and Finding My Way Back

I want to share something about BPM that we have not talked about publicly in much detail.

Bold Egg Naturals, the company behind BPM Deodorant, is a Certified Indigenous Business through the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business. I am a registered member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, and my family’s original name is Kohoko, which means owl.

I know I may not look like what some people picture when they hear “Indigenous.”

I look like my father, who was Lithuanian and Irish. My mother, who is Algonquin, raised me on her own in Toronto. My parents were never married, and after my father died, my surname was changed to his. So I carry the name and much of the appearance of a man I did not grow up with, along with the heritage of the mother who actually raised me.

Indigenous people come in every appearance you can imagine. There is no single look. Families like mine are part of that story.

I also did not grow up closely connected to my community. That is something I have struggled with more as I have grown older.

There are many reasons Indigenous people grow up disconnected. Some are personal. Others reach back through residential schools, the child welfare system, adoption and government policies that separated families and interrupted the passing down of language, culture and community. Those effects do not stop with one generation.

For most of my life, being Algonquin was something I knew about myself, but not something I knew how to live inside. I knew where my mother came from. I knew our family name. But I did not grow up with a strong relationship to Pikwàkanagàn, and I was never quite sure what to do with that distance.

My career took me in a completely different direction. I spent years in technology and product management before moving into investment and eventually starting Bold Egg Naturals.

BPM did not begin as a heritage project. It began because I wanted to make a better deodorant. Something natural that worked, used less wasteful packaging and did not come with an inflated price. I built it through formulation work, packaging problems, testing, mistakes and a lot of persistence.

But as BPM became a real business, it also gave me an opportunity to bring forward a part of myself that I had mostly left in the background.

Getting the company certified through the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business meant more to me than putting a badge on a website. The certification confirmed that BPM is majority Indigenous owned and controlled. On paper, that is straightforward. Personally, it meant putting my family history on the table and saying openly that this is part of who I am.

It became a small but concrete way to reconnect.

Indigenous ownership does not mean that I have built BPM around cultural imagery or teachings I did not grow up with. It means something simpler and more tangible. It means an Indigenous person owns this company, makes its decisions and benefits from the value it creates. When BPM grows, an Indigenous owned Canadian business grows with it.

It also means that building BPM has become part of my own unfinished relationship with where I come from.

I do not have a neat ending to that story. I am a registered member of my Nation, but I am still figuring out what connection looks like for me. Building a business does not resolve that distance. It has simply given me a place to begin acknowledging it instead of leaving it unspoken.

There are probably more people in a similar position than most of us realize. People who know their history but did not grow up immersed in it. People who do not fit the expected picture. People finding their own way back, sometimes much later in life.

So when you see the Indigenous owned badge on our website, this is the story behind it.

BPM is the name customers know. Kohoko is the family name that came before it.

Both are now part of what I am building.

Thank you for being part of it.

Corey Goss
Founder, BPM Natural Deodorant