As some of my friends know, my dad does natural and organic skincare at a pretty large scale. About as long as I’ve been doing recreational cannabis I’ve been crossing paths with Essential Wholesale’s master formulator, kicking around ideas, and for the last few years: making things.
After formulating custom bases with the team at EWL, working through ratios on the back pages of a legal pad, purchasing DIY skincare making tools like emulsifiers and hot plates, I gave some friends some jars of a topical jelly with THC and CBD distillate in it. They all loved it. 5 of 5 came back for more. So I kept going.
After a few more versions, I landed on a CBD only formulation that isn’t regulated in state by state markets. I teamed up w/ Oren and we decided to call the product MuscleGoo and quietly put it online in CBD and non CBD versions. That was short lived. Doing too much wasn’t enough. Honestly, the single product brand just felt weird and disingenuous when creating content. We felt like we couldn’t write an informative blog post without it being perceived as a sales pitch. So we pivoted into a brand platform and called it Reco Mode, short for recovery mode.
We’re gonna use this as a platform for content and things in the wellness space. The skincare and canna crossover will be a common theme. Some of the first content I’ve started writing and researching for it has centered around the reason I started experimenting with what ended up as MuscleGoo in the first place: ingredients. The ingredients in products like Icy Hot are often times terrible, so we’ve done a whole series of blog posts taking deep dives into the make up of big brand products and ultimately comparing BioFreeze vs Icy Hot vs Bengay and more.
More to come!
