The story of how Nature’s Alternative CBD Specialists was founded by Owner and Managing Director Kyle.
My name is Kyle, Owner and Managing director of Nature’s Alternative CBD Specialists, one of Northern Irelands most trusted sources for all things CBD. Our company ethos has always been the same; supply our local community with handpicked high-quality CBD products at an affordable price, using our wealth of knowledge to tailor our recommendations to each customer, based on their individual needs and budget. Here’s how it all began….
Necessity is the greatest motivator.
Rewind the clocks, its early 2017, the CBD industry was very much in its infancy, and I have yet another night of crippling anxiety getting in the way of a good sleep. Sat in my kitchen at 4am, scrolling though forum after forum desperately trying to find an alternative to prescription medications that just weren’t agreeing with me, when suddenly, I see those 3 magic little letters ‘C.B.D’ mentioned on a mental health forum. Having been well versed on the potential benefits the hemp plant can offer for pain management etc, I decided to give it a go for anxiety to see what it could offer.
One major problem I encountered when trying to source CBD, was that nowhere local seemed to stock it, and because of this, I was at the mercy of what seemed like a never-ending list of faceless websites, all promising to cure me, but with little to no human assistance to help me choose the right product. Getting fed up with my search, I made a mistake which could have halted my journey into the world of CBD right there and then …..I bought CBD oil from Amazon. Now, Amazon is great for a lot of things, CBD oil at the time, was not one of them. I would later find out that as they don’t actually allow the sale of CBD on their site, they put no effort into monitoring, categorising or regulating products of this nature, resulting in people often purchasing simple hemp seed oil mislabeled as CBD oil. Unfortunately, I was one of them.
Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice…. not a chance.
A few weeks had passed since my rookie mistake, but I didn’t want to give up. Having heard so many success stories, it was back to Google for me. With a bit of luck and what felt like a million searches later I discovered ‘The CBD Brothers’, a small, dedicated and altruistic company based in Guernsey, who began their venture through the love of helping people. After reading a few reviews and doing some research I decided, this is the company I’m putting my faith and money into. I ordered one 30ml bottle of their blue edition oil and began taking it immediately after it arrived.
For the first time in a long time, I slowly started to feel ‘normal’ again. My constant fight or flight, butterfly’s in my stomach nervous feeling was starting to fade and my mental clarity was returning.
The Light bulb moment
Fast forward to August 2017, my own success with CBD was often a talking point in conversations with friends and family as I was noticeably less anxious. More and more people started to ask me where they could buy it, often by followed by “someone should be selling this locally!”. I probably heard that about five or six times before I had my light bulb moment…..”Maybe I should open a CBD Shop?” Having already put the research in, I knew that there weren’t any Shops in Northern Ireland that that specialised in CBD exclusively. Although the industry was growing and chemists, the odd market stall and a handful of health food shops now stocked CBD, no where was offering the level of variety, knowledge and reliability that other parts of the UK and Europe where experiencing, but all that was about to change, Northern Ireland was about to get its first bricks-and-mortar CBD specialists.
Nature’s Alternative
Il skip the boring stuff…. supplier meetings, endless searching of high-quality products to stock, the hours our cannabinoid research and education that turned into days, weeks, months and now years to get us where we are today.
We opened the shop on October 16th, 2017 and with a bit of luck, CBD started to get some very positive mainstream media attention shortly after, which led to us becoming increasingly busy. In 2019 our hard work, dedication and desire to help others was recognised in the form of 2 awards in the Firmus energy & local women magazine award show, as we walked away with the ‘Best New Business’ and ‘Best overall’ awards which was very unexpected due to the nature of our business and the stigma attached to the products we sell. This achievement made me realise that the stigma we set out to remove, was slowly crumbling as more and more people understood the vital differences between our products ( made from registered strains of agricultural hemp) and psychoactive ‘street’ cannabis (grown in someone’s roof space for recreational use).
The Future
At the time of writing this we are now firmly into 2021 and the UK CBD industry is estimated to worth over £400 Million, with approximately 6 million people in the UK having tried CBD. This rapid growth has been fantastic to see, but with it has come a flood of very low quality products and con men wanting to make a quick buck, and a mockery of the industry while they are at it. This has made our job of sourcing great products increasingly difficult…. but it’s what we do and will hopefully continue to do for many years to come. We now stock products from over 25 of Europe’s highest regarded manufactures and suppliers and continue to expand with our customer base.
If your reading this as one of our customers…hello and thank you! If your reading this as someone interested in trying CBD for the first time, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and see what we do for you.
Thanks,
Kyle
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