Some brands make sense immediately. ACTIVIST was one of those. We first encountered it through a special collaboration with Bodha for the Beeswax Eau da Parfum, and the more time we spent with the products, the more they settled into our daily rhythms—used, reached for, and eventually relied on.

Founded in New Zealand by Gabrielle Mirkin and Luke Harwood, ACTIVIST began with a simple guiding principle: let nature lead. Rooted in the landscapes of Aotearoa, New Zealand, their raw Mānuka honey is wild-foraged from remote regions and left completely unheated, allowing its natural activity to develop in its own time. Known for its naturally high antibacterial properties, Mānuka honey has long been used to support immunity, soothe the throat, aid digestion, and calm irritated skin—benefits that feel especially meaningful when the product remains as close to its original state as possible.

Each jar is independently tested and certified in New Zealand, clearly marked with its MGO level as a way of honoring transparency and integrity. This clarity matters: MGO is the naturally occurring compound responsible for Mānuka honey's potency, slowly formed over times from the nectar of the Mānuka flower. The result is a honey that is not only rich and complex in flavor, but genuinely functional—something you can take daily, stir into warm drinks, or apply directly to the skin.

What started with honey has gradually expanded into a small collection of everyday essentials, all guided by the same values of honesty, restraint, and respect for origin. There's nothing rushed here, nothing overworked. ACTIVIST's products feel grounded and purposeful, shaped by the rhythms of the natural world rather than trends or urgency.

We did a Q&A with Gabrielle to talk about the beginnings of ACTIVIST, the values that continue to shape the brand, and what it means to work in step with nature—trusting time, seasonality, and process to do what they do best.

You spent many years working in fashion publishing as an art director. What did that world teach you about image and desire—and what ultimately pushed you to leave it and create ACTIVIST?

The art and culture of fashion is defining; it taught me individuality and uniqueness. I love all those things from history and culture that makes certain parts of fashion important and worth preserving such as the art, photography, design and a representation of a particular time of great creation of boldness. I worked at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and really learnt from the best. I feel like that world was always in my blood; my grandfather was a fashion illustrator and had a studio in Manhattan for more than 50 years, working for the likes of Pierre Cardin, Barneys and all the great designers and department stores. My younger sister is also a prolific fashion stylist in New York City. But the repetition and consumer driven part of fashion and the magazine cycles became too much for me. I was often at the Condé Nast office until 11pm at night and then back there early again the next morning. At the same time I became very unwell literally overnight and was later diagnosed with Lyme Disease; a bacterial infection from a tick bite. It really took over my life and I made the hard decision to leave my job and leave Manhattan to go back to Aotearoa, New Zealand for a year; take some time out and focus on my health and healing. 

Was there a particular turning point when you realized you needed a life and business more rooted in nature? How did that personal shift become the seed of ACTIVIST rather than “just” a lifestyle change?

Yes – it was there, living on our beautiful piece of coastal land in our black barn, surrounded by native Mānuka trees that ACTIVIST was born. Our beekeeper friends asked if they could keep their beehives on our land and we happily agreed. They would give us beautiful raw monofloral medicinal Mānuka Honey, which I used so much in my healing journey to restore my immune and digestive systems which were both so destroyed from the year of antibiotics I had been on. The bees were such environmental indicators for what was going on that day and seasonal weather patterns. Through this deep time of healing on our native land came the inspiration and birth of ACTIVIST.

Why honey? Out of all the possible mediums you could have built a brand around after fashion, what drew you specifically to Mānuka honey and bee medicine as your central material?

My love for Mānuka Honey can be traced to my childhood growing up on a beautiful avocado farm in New Zealand. Mānuka Honey is the medicine of choice for kiwi kids. You have a sore throat or a cough, you take a spoonful of Mānuka Honey. You have a sore tummy, you take a spoonful of Mānuka Honey. You fall over and graze yourself, well you put Mānuka Honey on the wound with a bandaid over the top. My husband also grew up on a beautiful isolated farm in New Zealand, so beekeepers and honey were always a part of our lives growing up in New Zealand. My mum and I would do Mānuka Honey masks together when I was a little girl. Mānuka Honey then re-entered my life as an adult in the most beautiful way; when I started using high-grade medicinal Mānuka Honey from our land to aid in healing my immune and digestive system. It was my medicine. Honey is really honest – it's a gift straight from Mother Nature. So to work with Mānuka Honey is nothing egotistical; it’s very humble but beautiful. The way we tell our story and present it to the world is important in an artistic sense, preserving Mānuka in its fullest form.

The name ACTIVIST is strong and intentional. What does “activism” mean to you in the context of honey, land, and everyday beauty rituals?

The name is really jarring and primal, but also related back to a lot of good things in my upbringing around living simply and enjoying the coastlines which inherently is the magic of New Zealand's landscapes and the origin of the Mānuka tree. My husband grew up in a small surfing and fishing town on the east-coast of New Zealand. There was a local surfer and surfboard shaper who mentored him through his teenage years. He was such an activist without calling himself one. Just really vocal about no mining in the area and protecting our waterways and coastlines. There are a lot of great New Zealanders like that. So he had the simple teachings of preservation clearly engrained in him from a young age through the joyful adventures of surfing and someone he looked up to. We see ACTIVIST as the steward for upholding and presenting premium Mānuka Honey on a world stage at the luxury end. The name ACTIVIST also represents all the potent active components, enzymes and antibacterial properties found in our Mānuka Honey which are so beneficial for internal wellness and topical beauty rituals.  

You work with a living medium—bees, plants, weather, changing microclimates. What has working so closely with honey taught you about control, patience, and surrender?

A lot! Our Mānuka Honey and Raw Mānuka Oil harvesting season is completely dependent on the weather patterns in the South Pacific, where the two main skinny islands of New Zealand are positioned, right at the bottom of the world. We work closely with our beekeepers who position their hives in extremely remote and pristine areas of New Zealand – often areas which are hard to access so need four wheel drives or a Polaris to access. There’s a lot of patience and surrender when working with this golden nectar straight from Mother Nature. For instance, our 850+ and 1000+MGO Raw Mānuka Honey is annually hand-produced in small amounts making it a limited edition offering. The 1000+MGO is thick and rich full of enzymes, antibacterial properties and benefits. Factoring in so many elements over harvesting is essential to get this grade so pure and unadulterated. Our honeys are dense mono-floral Mānukas with no other floral influences, meaning our hives are located in deep and pristine Mānuka terrain free of other flowering plants and trees. The Mānuka tree is wild and self seeding. It makes up one of the key layers in the New Zealand native landscape and plant life, which is so beautiful. Not only is the flower beautiful, but the leaf of the tree is fully a healing leaf and the part of the tree that our Raw Mānuka Oil comes from. We use the Raw Mānuka Oil in all of our A.M.S beauty offerings. The Mānuka Oil is extremely hard to source and ours is the highest potency, most pure and best you can find anywhere in the world. I work directly with a farmer whose family has owned a 500 hectare island covered in dense Mānuka trees for generations. The island is a five hour boat ride from the mainland of New Zealand and has no electricity. If you have power it is all solar powered. He hand-harvests all the leaves and twigs of the Mānuka tree for us every few weeks and freshly distills this oil. The weather on his island can be very temperamental and wild a lot of the year, so him and I really have to surrender to this as he can only harvest during nice dry sunny spells. Harvesting and distilling the oil is also very labor intensive. Because of all these reasons and the potent medicinal healing properties of the oil – our oil is very limited-edition and often sold out.    

All our harvesting is so dependent on microclimates and the seasons. We leave our honey in a raw state so the taste, color and texture is so unique and changes season to season and batch to batch. Like a beautiful biodynamic wine, we love to celebrate the differences in our honey from season to season. I love that some of our Mānuka Honey that comes from coastal hive positions, has a slightly salty taste, with is relating to the rock and soil minerals along the coast in which the trees grow.

Could you walk us through a Mānuka season from your perspective—from first blossom to jar—and share a couple of behind-the-scenes details most people would never guess happen along the way?

Mānuka Honey harvesting season is a very short window of 2 to 6 weeks of the year at the start of summer in the southern hemisphere. The Mānuka tree only flowers for this very short window, which is one of the reasons that makes Mānuka Honey so rare and hard to source. If the weather is not calm and sunny during this time and there is a lot of rain, the flowers are then knocked off the tree and the bees can’t collect the nectar from the flowers. The hand-picked and then dried Mānuka flowers that we use in our soap, can also only be picked during this time. You want to position the hives in deep Mānuka terrain with no other floral influences. This is one of the ways of achieving high-grade mono floral Mānuka Honey with a high MGO rating. Something people might not know is that Mānuka Honey contains a very special antibacterial component called Methylglyoxal. The higher the MGO the higher the potency of the honey, the greater the internal and topical benefits. All our honey is tested and certified for the MGO level by two of the only certified labs in New Zealand. Mānuka Honey is a strict industry in New Zealand with very high standards for testing, transparency and purity of product.