A message from our founders

For us, helping people feel better and live better has meant creating simple and effective natural remedies that serve as a holistic first line of defense against common ailments. Turns out, it takes a lot of steps to keep things purely simple and our products are a reflection of the care and commitment required to live up to our mission. Thank you for joining us!

- With gratitude,
Ret and Adriaan

Founders, Ret and Adriaan

Who We Are

Origin
Evolution
Our Team
Ned® is the result of two friends, Ret and Adriaan, who started in different places arriving at the same destination. For years, we’d been living lives that left us feeling empty, bewildered, and disconnected. It wasn’t just us – everyone around us seemed beset by anxiety, stress, device addiction, you name it. The so-called solutions – pills, paychecks, more consumerism – seemed only to address the symptoms, never the underlying issues. Something about this way of life just wasn’t working.

Ret discovered full spectrum hemp years before it hit the mainstream. His mom had been diagnosed with cancer and after she opted to skip radiation, Ret took it upon himself to learn all he could about the available natural remedies her doctors weren’t talking about. Hemp was one of those remedies and Ret spent two years bouncing from one brand to another, never developing a true sense of trust with any of them. Sometimes it was a lack of quality and other times it was a frustrating lack of transparency about the process and sourcing. He took it upon himself to go deeper and started meeting with hemp farmers out in their fields. Finally, in the fields of Paonia, CO, he met a farmer who practiced what he preached, raising a 1-acre field of plants with the care and intention of one truly connected to the earth and his craft. Quality was his goal, not quantity. A friendship was struck.

Meanwhile, after spending a decade in the world’s largest cities working 70-plus-hour work-weeks, Adriaan had increasingly realized that something was fundamentally out of balance. Material pursuits brought with them anxiety and a looming sense of disconnect. He discovered that the life he thought he wanted brought only a sense of discontent. These feelings eventually culminated in a total burnout, topped off by a full-blown panic attack in front of his entire 75-person company. He knew a change was needed and left behind the life he knew, spending the next 2 years living out of a backpack and rediscovering the virtues of nature, simplicity, and true human connection. Along the way, he published his writings about recovering from burnout, which were recognized in publications like Thrive Global and The Street.

We reconnected over a shared passion for discovering the tools that would get to the heart of the issues we, our friends, and families were experiencing. Adriaan’s approach was focused on harmonizing the mind, while Ret delved deep into the body, pulling from his experience as a leader in nature therapy primal movement. Sharing these discoveries with others became our common purpose and eventually lead to the creation of Ned.

We decided our first “business meeting” would take place while climbing South Arapahoe Peak outside of Boulder, CO. We got turned around by a blizzard before reaching the summit but we came away from the adventure with our core principles – keep it simple, keep it natural, only work with extraordinary people, and always think of the customer and the greater environmental impact. With these in place, Ned was born and we could begin our mission – helping people feel better and live better through simple means and a deeper connection to the natural world.
Humble beginnings keep you honest. Our’s trace back to Ret’s garage. Along with our friends and significant others, we labelled bottles by hand, packed every order, and spent countless hours with customers answering each and every question we received. And then people responded in a big way.

Since those early days, we’ve shipped tens thousands of orders and created new lines of products. We’ve been able to set up our ‘Nedquarters’ in Boulder, CO, complete with our own laboratory, a small warehouse and a growing team of extraordinary humans who we’re lucky to call coworkers.

Along the way, we’ve also developed a powerful community of like-minded friends and customers, committed to raising awareness of the healing properties of full-spectrum hemp oil and other natural remedies. We’ve committed tens of thousands of dollars to nonprofit organizations like POW and Period.org, planted thousands of trees, sent children to camp, and helped advocate for issues from climate change to wildfire relief.

We’ve come a long way in a short time and met so many fantastic people along the way. But life doesn’t sit still and neither can we – we are always searching for new remedies to help people feel better and live better and are dedicated to bringing you the best the natural world has to offer.
Ret Taylor, Co-Founder
Ret is inspired by his passion for natural remedies and committed to helping people find a deeper connection to the natural world. He is an outdoors-man, endurance athlete, environmentalist, husband and father.

Adriaan Zimmerman, Co-Founder
Adriaan is a serial entrepreneur and brand-builder. He's an avid traveler, photographer and writer, gaining recognition for his writings around his experiences with burning out and stepping away from the rat race.

Bryan Smith, Head of E-Commerce
Bryan followed his interests in health and wellness to Colorado after college and never left. He loves asking simple questions that require complex answers, riding bikes, skiing, and playing golf on the weekend.

Rory Coulter, Head of Content
Rory is inspired by her passion for slow, simple, sustainable living. She is a writer, vintage shopkeeper, and Waldorf-inspired homeschooling mama.

Briana Smith, Head of Customer Happiness
Briana lives and breathes all things plants, movement, and ritual. She is a humble student of the natural world and passionate about the reclamation of sacred relations in everyday life. She is a professional dancer, Certified Yoga Teacher, Vital Herbalist & folk medicine practitioner.

Matthew Maron, Head of Fulfillment & Logistics

Our Values

Keep it simple. Keep it natural.

What We Stand For

Forces of Nature

We believe simplicity is the answer to the complexity of modern life, and that through a deep connection to the natural world everyone can rediscover how to heal and even thrive.

Transparency

We Bare it All

Ned products are crafted with love, care, and exceedingly high standards of quality. And we aren’t afraid to let you behind the curtain – in fact, we welcome you.

All of our products revolve around the relationships we build with makers and growers. We are there at every step of the process and are always willing to get our hands dirty. We insist on a high level of personal involvement because we insist on an even higher level of quality. Personal experience has shown us that the best way to keep yourself honest is putting your own boots on the ground and participating.

When it comes to our full-spectrum hemp oil, it all starts with people and plants – everything is sourced directly from just a few small farms. We work with the farmers to select strains of non-GMO hemp known for superior hemp compound and terpene profiles, effectiveness, and flavor. And we always ensure that everything is grown the way we’d want it ourselves – in natural sunlight in the fresh soil of Paonia, CO watered by fresh, Rocky Mountain snow melt.

Once the hemp is harvested, we use slow and cold ethanol extraction to ensure we capture all the organic compounds present in the flowers.

Did we mention we only use hemp flowers? No stalks and seeds here.

Our North Star

Re-connecting You to the Natural World

Modern life can be messy and we want to help you declutter. Pharmaceuticals that only mask the symptoms are not always the answer. Ned believes in a plants-before-pills approach to first-line remedies that always keeps it simple and natural.

Customer Happiness

Our Stress-Free Guarantee

Damaged package? We’ll replace it. Broken product? We’ll fix it. Your true love left you? Call us. Simply put, we’re here for you, we’ve got your back, and we’re not gonna let you have a bad experience if we can help it.
See our FAQ for more info on returns and exchanges.

Quadruple Bottom Line

Being Right vs. Being Right on the Money

We stopped believing “success = money” a long time ago. Today, we incorporate social & environmental impact, customer happiness, and coworker satisfaction into our metrics. Everything must pass this filter and each of the four stakeholders in our Quadruple Bottom Line.

Forces of Nature

We believe simplicity is the answer to the complexity of modern life, and that through a deep connection to the natural world everyone can rediscover how to heal and even thrive.

We Bare it All

Ned products are crafted with love, care, and exceedingly high standards of quality. And we aren’t afraid to let you behind the curtain – in fact, we welcome you.

All of our products revolve around the relationships we build with makers and growers. We are there at every step of the process and are always willing to get our hands dirty. We insist on a high level of personal involvement because we insist on an even higher level of quality. Personal experience has shown us that the best way to keep yourself honest is putting your own boots on the ground and participating.

When it comes to our full-spectrum hemp oil, it all starts with people and plants – everything is sourced directly from just a few small farms. We work with the farmers to select strains of non-GMO hemp known for superior hemp compound and terpene profiles, effectiveness, and flavor. And we always ensure that everything is grown the way we’d want it ourselves – in natural sunlight in the fresh soil of Paonia, CO watered by fresh, Rocky Mountain snow melt.

Once the hemp is harvested, we use slow and cold ethanol extraction to ensure we capture all the organic compounds present in the flowers.

Did we mention we only use hemp flowers? No stalks and seeds here.

Re-connecting You to the Natural World

Modern life can be messy and we want to help you declutter. Pharmaceuticals that only mask the symptoms are not always the answer. Ned believes in a plants-before-pills approach to first-line remedies that always keeps it simple and natural.

Our Stress-Free Guarantee

Damaged package? We’ll replace it. Broken product? We’ll fix it. Your true love left you? Call us. Simply put, we’re here for you, we’ve got your back, and we’re not gonna let you have a bad experience if we can help it.

See our FAQ for more info on returns and exchanges.

Being Right vs. Being Right on the Money

We stopped believing “success = money” a long time ago. Today, we incorporate social & environmental impact, customer happiness, and coworker satisfaction into our metrics. Everything must pass this filter and each of the four stakeholders in our Quadruple Bottom Line.

FAQ's

Got questions? We’ve got answers.

Where does the name Ned come from?

When we created Ned, we aimed to build a brand that was the epitome of approachability. In our long discussions about the company vision, what we stood for, and the message we wanted to put into the world, a character started to emerge.

The character was someone who could be a neighbor, a friend, a family member, or someone you meet in passing, but it was a person full of sage wisdom, smiles and captivating stories affirming a life well-traveled and better-lived. It was someone who made others feel at ease and accepted and could be trusted inherently. It was someone you could turn to for guidance on anything - from a time tested remedy for a headache, to learning about a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, to fixing a leaky faucet.

The character’s name came to us in one eureka moment… Ned. Ned embodies our brand in his simple ways, colloquial manners, and understated worldliness.

Perhaps he’s somewhere between the Big Lebowski cowboy and Sean Penn’s character in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. At the end of the day, Ned stands for simplicity and approachability and is whatever you interpret it/him to be!

Behind Ned is a small team; we’re an impassioned bunch who are obsessively driven to restore and strengthen a healthy and symbiotic connection between us humans and the natural world.

Where is Ned located?

Our Nedquarters is in beautiful Boulder, Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.

Come on by and say hi!

Does a portion of my purchase go to a good cause?

Yes, it certainly does!

We're proud members of 1% for the Planet so 1% off all our sales goes to a selection of environmental causes.

We also donate a portion of all of our Natural Cycle Collection sales to PERIOD.org, which is working to end period poverty.

Finally, we typically host a number of cause-based fundraisers throughout the year should there by an urgent need i.e. wildfire relief efforts.

See all of our FAQ’s