For Natalie Gilson, the ocean has never been just a backdrop. It has been a childhood memory, a creative calling, a career question, and now, the centre of a growing business with roots in Nova Scotia and reach well beyond it.
Pisces Oceans Inc., headquartered in Milford, Nova Scotia, is a strategic communications consultancy for marine science and ocean innovation. Its focus is the gap between ocean innovation and impact and is driven by the awareness that research, technology, and projects that could change the ocean’s future often stall because the right people never hear about them, understand them, or act on them.
As Natalie succinctly puts it, “Pisces helps people help the ocean through science, strategy, and story.”
The company was first incorporated in 2017 as Pisces Research Project Management Inc., founded by Kes Morton to give ocean projects the management support they often lacked. Over time, it became clear that researchers and innovators also needed help with strategy and with getting their story to the right people. That need is what drew Natalie in. She joined in 2023 after seven years running her own creative studio, and began building out the company’s science communications work.
“I’m very entrepreneurial at heart,” Natalie says. “I joined Pisces because it’s in the ocean industry, and that’s where my passion lies.”
When Kes decided to step away in January 2025 and offered up the company, Natalie saw an opportunity. By March, she and longtime team member Dr. Melissa Weber had taken ownership and renamed the company Pisces Oceans Inc. Today, Natalie leads Pisces as CEO. After a period of offering a broader mix of services, the company now focuses entirely on communications, built on three pillars: Science, Strategy, and Story.
Natalie often explains that work through the example of whale researchers.
“What they love doing is being hands-on in the water, collecting data from whales, being out on the boat,” she says. “But for their projects to keep going, to keep getting funded, and to get their research out there, they need to talk about their science in a way that resonates with funders and stakeholders. The science informs the message, the strategy informs how it’s shared with different audiences, and story is the human aspect: the part that moves hearts and minds to action.”
That is where Pisces comes in, turning their science into the strategy and stories that keep funders, partners, and the public behind their work.
“The real work begins when a project ends,” she says. Once the research is done and the data is collected, the question becomes how that work can move things forward for communities, policy, and the ocean. “That’s the role communications plays: taking science and giving it impact.”
Historically, many of Pisces’ clients have been in Nova Scotia’s ocean tech sector, along with academic, government, and non-profit clients. But the company’s scope is increasingly broad. Ocean challenges do not stay neatly inside borders, and neither do the people working to solve them.
That became especially clear during a CBDC-led trade mission to Barbados in May 2026. The mission gave Pisces the chance to explore opportunities in the Caribbean with an open mind: to understand the market, meet people, and see where the company’s expertise might be useful.
The experience exceeded expectations. Pisces took part in roughly 20 meetings, many of them with decision-makers and organizations already working on significant ocean initiatives. In the first meeting, with the University of the West Indies, Pisces was invited back to deliver a guest lecture on storytelling techniques.
For Natalie, the trip also made the urgency of ocean work deeply visible. In Barbados, she saw coastal challenges up close, including disappearing beaches and sargassum blooms that had made the Atlantic coast difficult to use.
“You can see when you go to a place like Barbados that they’re experiencing them to a whole different level,” she says. “To talk to the people who are living through these things and trying to solve these things was really eye-opening.”
The mission also reinforced how strongly Pisces’ storytelling work resonates. Many ocean organizations are deeply immersed in the science and seriousness of their challenges, but still need ways to connect people emotionally to why the work matters.
“People really resonated strongly with the storytelling side of what Pisces does,” Natalie says.
That blend of science, strategy, and story is also what makes Pisces difficult to compare to anything else. There are many scientists in the ocean sector. There are communications companies that touch on strategy and sometimes story. But Pisces brings those pieces together in a model shaped specifically for ocean leaders and ocean projects.
“It does very much feel like Pisces is building its own ship,” Natalie says.
That sense of purpose has already earned recognition. In fall 2025, Pisces received a BMO for Women grant and award. Natalie recalls realizing at the event that the company had been selected from thousands of applicants across Canada.
“We were the only ocean sector company represented,” she says. “It was really validating that not only are we on the right track, but that people are seeing that what we’re doing is different and important.”
Behind the business strategy is a personal connection to the ocean that runs deep. Natalie’s earliest memory is from a canoe trip on the West Coast with her parents when she was two years old. A harbour seal surfaced nearby, and the encounter stayed with her.
“When you’re two and you don’t know what that is, it’s just so mind-blowing and formative,” she says.
That connection continued through childhood summers on the West Coast, family trips to Hawaii, and learning to dive and surf. Still, for years, Natalie wondered whether there was a place for her skill set in the ocean sector. She did not see herself as a marine biologist or a fisher, the careers people often imagine first when they think about ocean work.
Now, Pisces has given her a way to bring creative, strategic, and entrepreneurial skills into the industry she cares about most.
“The ocean industry needs all these skills,” she says. “We need the things that people learn outside of oceans and plug it into oceans so that the industry does better.”
Looking ahead, Pisces is preparing for a larger role. The next phase is about building communications capacity for ocean projects, their leaders, and their teams, with tools that help projects reach their goals, get technology adopted, and turn ideas into impact. Natalie’s long-term goal is for Pisces to set the standard for global ocean communications, so people everywhere can use communications for the good of the ocean.
That is the heart of Pisces Oceans: a communications consultancy built for the complexity and urgency of ocean work. From Milford outward, Natalie Gilson is helping ocean leaders find the strategy, confidence, and voice to move ambitious work forward.
And in the process, Pisces is proving that the people who help others tell ocean stories have a powerful story of their own.