Where It All Began For Originals CBD - The Real Story
By the Founder of Originals CBD
It Started With a Question
A few years back I lost someone very close to me. I won't go into the details - some things are too personal for a blog post - but it set me off on a path of research into natural remedies and alternative approaches to wellbeing that I don't think I'd have gone down otherwise.
That research kept bringing me back to one plant. Cannabis - specifically CBD hemp - and the broader family of cannabinoids that come with it. CBDA, CBG, CBN. The more I read, the more I became convinced that nature had already solved a lot of problems that we'd been handed synthetic answers to.
Think about it this way. Ginger has been used for digestion for thousands of years - you can buy it in any supermarket, nobody bats an eyelid. Chamomile for sleep. Lavender for anxiety. Herbal teas and plant-based remedies are completely normalised. Yet hemp - a non-psychoactive plant with arguably more potential than any of them - has spent decades being treated like a controlled substance. That contradiction genuinely frustrated me. Still does.
That frustration became the foundation of everything Originals CBD is built on.
The UK Market Was a Mess
This was around 2022. CBD flower had technically been in a grey area in the UK for a while but the market was, frankly, a disaster. The majority of what was being sold here was coming from European growers who were in it purely for the money. Flowers being sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids to bump up the numbers. No love for the craft, no respect for the plant, no care about what the end consumer was actually putting into their body.
I got hold of samples from supplier after supplier. None of them made the cut. My SEO guy at the time was going mad at me - he couldn't market a shop with no products in it. But I wasn't putting my name on something I didn't believe in. That wasn't why I started this.
So I looked further afield and found what I was looking for in America - farmers in Oregon who were growing CBD hemp the way it deserved to be grown. Outdoors, under the sun, in some of the best growing conditions on the planet. People who genuinely loved what they did and it showed in every single bud.
The Reddit Post That Changed Everything
When I finally had product I believed in I did something a bit unconventional. I went on Reddit and wrote honestly about the state of the UK CBD market - about the sprayed flowers, the corner-cutting, the growers who didn't care. I explained what I'd found in America and why I thought UK consumers deserved better.
It blew up. Some people loved it. Some people - other vendors mostly - absolutely hated it. I got abuse, false accusations, the lot. But the response from actual customers was overwhelming. People were frustrated too. They knew something was off with what they'd been buying and here was someone finally saying it out loud.
That post was the real beginning of Originals CBD. Not a business plan, not a marketing strategy - just an honest conversation with a community that deserved honesty.
What We Actually Believe
We sell CBD hemp flower for use as a herbal tea. That's it. That's the legal, straightforward description of what we do.
But what drives us is something bigger than that. We believe hemp is one of the most remarkable plants on this planet - historically used for food, medicine, textiles and more - and that the stigma it carries is a hangover from decades of prohibition that has nothing to do with its actual properties or potential.
We're not anti-medicine. We're not making health claims. What we are is genuinely passionate about giving people access to the highest quality, most natural version of this plant that exists anywhere in the world - sourced with integrity, tested properly and sold honestly.
No added terpenes. No CBD isolate sprayed on to inflate numbers. No cutting corners because margins are tight. If it doesn't meet the standard we'd hold ourselves to personally, it doesn't go on the site. That's been the rule from day one and it isn't changing.
Where We Are Now
We've built relationships with some of the best growers in the world - farmers in Oregon's Rogue Valley, indoor cultivators across the US, hashish producers whose craft goes back generations. We haven't made it to the farms in person yet - though that's very much on the agenda - but we've spent hours on FaceTime walking through grow rooms and drying barns with people who care as much about this as we do. We've been to Spannabis and Mary Jane, met suppliers face to face, tried product before we'd ever consider listing it.
The community that's grown around Originals CBD is something we're genuinely proud of. Customers who know their terpenes, who understand genetics, who send us long emails about the strains they've tried and what they thought. That's not a typical retail relationship - that's a shared passion for something we all believe deserves more respect than it gets.
We're still the same outfit that started with a Reddit post and a refusal to stock anything we didn't believe in. That hasn't changed and it won't.
Stay Relaxed, Stay Original.
Sean