Nordic Oil: A Portrait of Europe’s fastest-growing CBD brand

Sensing an opportunity in the promotion of positive health effects of CBD, Nordic Oil was founded by the Danish brothers Dannie and Christian in 2018 and quickly gained traction in multiple European countries. One-and-a-half years later in 2019, the brothers took the research from their development of medicinal CBD creams against psoriasis, acne and eczema and launched a full skincare line under the name Nordic Cosmetics. At present, it is the market leader in the CBD space of Europe with more than 250,000 customers due to its innovative approach to product development and way of building an extremely loyal customer base.

How did Nordic Oil start?

Dannie explains that both him and his brother are entrepreneurs by heart and actually never really had a job, but always were working with their own startups. As always with startups, some were more successful than others, but as time passed the two brothers, who moved from Denmark to Germany 10 year ago, developed a system for building up successful startups.

Dannie was the first of the two brothers to discover CBD. Due to life-threatening allergy against most common painkillers, he was searching for natural remedy against recurring migraines.

After first being positively surprised by the positive effects of CBD they were shocked by the lack of serious and trustworthy providers of CBD in Europe.

Christian explains that it was obvious that most vendors were selling low-quality products with no focus on customers at all at horrendous prices. So they decided to start Nordic Oil as a “passionate side project” and shake up the CBD market and show that somebody in this business actually care about their customers.

The purpose-driven approach and focus on caring about customers over profit paid off, and Christian and Dannie quickly had to allocate staff from their other businesses into Nordic Oil to keep up with the explosive demand, and this is how Nordic Oil was born.

What made Nordic Oil click?

What really sets Nordic Oil apart from other brands is not just their size and growth rate, but the fact that this has all been achieved without any form of external investments. Both founders agree that the key to Nordic Oil’s success is the clear dedication to the company’s “why”. Dannie explains that “all of our employees know why our company exists: To make CBD accessible and understandable. And everything we are doing should fulfil our why”.

CBD has been praised for its successful treatment of multiple conditions such as epilepsy and the market for CBD has been booming the recent years. According to reports, the global CBD market grew by 133 per cent just in 2018 and it has attracted numerous celebrities such as Megan Rapanoe and Martha Stewart who are both involved in CBD startups.

Christian adds: “The boom in the CBD market has also been a challenge for us. We see new CBD brands entering the market on a daily basis whereof the majority are not caring enough about the quality. We recently did a study on 27 competing brands and we uncovered that only four of these did testing for e.g. heavy metals and pesticides. These brands are not only underbidding and ruining the market but they are also endangering consumers of which many already suffer from health issues.”

What does the future for Nordic Oil look like?

The brothers both agree that the journey has just begun. Nordic Oil is already becoming a “household name” in the European CBD market but there is still plenty of room for growth into new markets and product categories. Nordic Oil was recently, as the first cannabis company ever, rewarded with a spot in the prestigious German Accelerator, an accelerator programme funded by German government aiming to help promising start-ups enter and succeed in the US market. This way Nordic Oil was able to establish local presence and enter the US market within just a few months.

But the founders also still see a huge untouched potential in the European market: “While we are really strong in central and northern Europe, we still are new to countries such as France, Italy and Spain where we also are currently experiencing our strongest growth rates” Dannie explains.

Christian adds, “We are also working on a number of new product categories which we will be launching as separate sub brands within the next months. We are among others looking a lot in to products developed especially for athletes, and we have been able to develop a fully anti-doping compliant product which is currently being tested by one the best soccer teams in the German Bundesliga.”

Judging on what Nordic Oil has achieved in this short time and their plans for the future it is safe to say, that exciting times are awaiting this young startup, which was also recently awarded as one of “3 Promising Start-ups Worth Watching for in 2020” by Reader’s Digest.