23 years of OLIVEDA (born August 23, 2003) – Thomas’s dream of becoming an olive farmer.

After I had healed myself with the power of the olive trees, I couldn’t simply return to my old life.
I felt called.
Not to start another company or sell just any product.
I wanted to become an olive farmer.
For me, this path felt absolutely right. To everyone else, it sounded completely crazy.
My family and the people around me tried to talk sense into me.
You don’t have any experience at all.
You don’t know anything about olive cultivation.
You’re German and you don’t come from a family of olive farmers.
That’s not a plan. That’s just a crazy dream.
They had been right about everything.
I had no experience. No training. No knowledge passed down through generations. And no guarantee that this path would lead anywhere.
But I had experienced what the olive trees had done to me.
So I decided against everyone else’s opinion – including my family’s.
I went to Florence.
Not because I knew what I was supposed to do there.
But because I knew I couldn’t stay where I was.
For six months I tried, in Florence, to get closer to my dream of becoming an olive farmer.
For six months, nothing worked.
No breakthrough. No validation. No sign that my decision had been the right one.
Slowly, everyone else seemed to be proven right.
Maybe I had really just been following a crazy dream.
At some point, I was at my limit.
I decided to give up and return to Germany. Back to a sensible life. Back to the world everyone had warned me not to leave.
The decision had been made.
And then my doorbell rang.
For the first time ever.
In front of it stood a priest.
In his hand he was holding an olive branch.
He blessed me.
A priest. An olive branch. Exactly at the moment when I had decided to leave the path of the olive trees.
You could call it coincidence.
I couldn’t do it.
For me, it was a sign.
As if the olive trees themselves were saying to me:
You’re not done yet.
Keep going.
So I kept going.

The craziest laboratory in the world

In 2001, a tree house in the middle of an olive tree became my laboratory.
There were no white coats. No sterile walls. No scientific team and no finished plan.
Bottles, jars, olive leaves, bark, roots and countless experiments were everywhere.
Things were mixed, discarded, and started all over again.
Bottles flew.
Some mixtures foamed over.
Some exploded.
It was loud. Wild. Chaotic.
Because there was no scientist here working from a known formula. Here, one person was fighting for an idea that no one but him believed in yet.
I didn’t just want to extract the power of the olive tree.
I wanted to preserve it.
I wanted to create an elixir that carries within it the millennia-old vitality of these trees and reaches people from the inside.
But it didn’t work.
One attempt followed the next. Hundreds became thousands. Time and again, the solution seemed within reach. And time and again, it failed.
There were nights full of hope and days full of despair.
Moments when giving up would have been the only reasonable thing to do.
But reason never creates anything that has never existed before.
So I kept going.
Until one day it worked.
In the midst of this chaos, I01 – the first Oliveda product was born.
Not a cream.
A green, exceptionally bitter-tasting, drinkable cell elixir harnessing the power of the olive tree.
Beauty from within.

And then came the silence

I01 was finished.
But no one except me knew this product.
No one knew what this green elixir was. And I had no idea how people would react to it.
I sent out a few hundred bottles.
Then I waited.
No call.
No letter.
No response.
Nothing.
Days passed. Then weeks.
The longer the silence lasted, the greater my doubts grew.
Maybe I had been wrong.
Maybe it had all just been a crazy dream.
Maybe in the end everyone else had been right.
Again, I thought about quitting.
Like back then in Florence.
But whenever I was about to leave my path, the trees were there. Then came the signs from nature – sometimes quiet, sometimes so clear that I couldn’t overlook them.
And suddenly the first testimonials came in.
People reported extraordinary changes. Impressive before-and-after experiences followed, which were later documented as part of medically supervised studies.
After all those weeks of silence, it was as if the olive trees were answering again.
Not by a priest with an olive branch.
This time they spoke through the people.
The message was the same:
You’re not done yet.
Keep going.

Not only a product was created in the treehouse

I01 was only the beginning.
People’s experiences wouldn’t let me go. They led me to the next crazy idea: to create something completely holistic that works from the inside out and at the same time from the outside in.
This is how Olive Tree Therapy was intuitively created in the tree house – my Mediterranean answer to Ayurveda.
There was no manual.
No ready-made treatment plan.
No scientific guidance.
Only my experience, my intuition, and what the olive trees had taught me.
In the tree house, enemas with high-quality extra virgin olive oil were created.
Full-body wraps made from finely ground olive leaves – that green powder from which, many years later, our Olive Matcha emerged.
Wraps made from puréed black olives.
Oil pulling with high-quality extra virgin olive oil as a ritual for the oral cavity and gums.
And the olive tree meditation, in which you become still, feel your own roots again, and consciously connect with the tree.
What at first looked like a collection of completely crazy ideas came together into a holistic system.
A few years later, we brought Olive Tree Therapy, developed in the treehouse, to the Oliveda Spa in Mallorca.
That’s where the vision became reality.
People were examined before the start of the therapy and again after two weeks. The extraordinary before-and-after results were documented and confirmed under conventional medical supervision.
What had come into being in a tree house without prior knowledge, without a manual, and without permission suddenly became visible.
And measurable.

I had luxurious spas in mind where people would experience the Olive Tree Therapy.
But for that I needed more than I01.
So for the first time in my life, I started thinking about creams.
I had no idea about cosmetics. I didn’t know how creams were made. I hadn’t even consciously registered that something like a special eye cream existed.
So I started researching.
In the process, I discovered that 1911 was the first time a stable oil-in-water cream could be produced industrially on a large scale.
This invention revolutionized cosmetics.
But it also led to water gradually becoming the main ingredient in countless skincare products.
I studied the INCI lists of modern creams.
Water was at the top of almost every list.
At first I didn’t know what that meant.
Then I learned that the ingredient listed first usually makes up the largest share of a product.
In many creams, up to 70 or 80 percent of the content was just water.
I was stunned.
Water?
For almost a century, hardly anyone had questioned this foundation.
But I didn’t come from the cosmetics industry. I had never learned its rules.
And maybe that was exactly why I was able to break them.
I asked a simple question:
Why don’t we replace the water with the cell elixir of the olive leaf?
Why should the base of a cream be almost inactive water when it could instead consist of the concentrated power of the olive tree?
In that moment, Waterless Beauty was born.
I01 had opened the path from within.
Waterless skincare opened it from the outside.
From the inside out.
From the outside in.
The Olive Tree Therapy was complete.

Back then, almost no one knew what hydroxytyrosol was.
Long before the active ingredient became publicly known and long before EFSA officially evaluated the importance of olive oil polyphenols, I had already begun working with hydroxytyrosol.
There was no trend.
No market.
And no marketing plan.
Hardly anyone could read the name. No one could remember it. Almost no one could pronounce it.
Any reasonable marketing expert would have advised us to choose an easier and more attractive name.
We did the opposite.
We wrote the word on our products:
HYDROXYTYROSOL.
Big.
Complicated.
Impossible to miss.
This is how our Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line came into being.
We didn’t hide the key active ingredient somewhere in a long list of ingredients. We made it the focus of an entire skincare line.
We not only had to explain to people what our products could do.
First we had to teach them how to pronounce their most important active ingredient at all.

What experts considered impossible

Beauty experts had advised me not to start with facial care.
Too difficult.
Too many big brands.
No chance for someone who had no idea about creams.
I did it anyway.
Later, retailers advised us against drinkable cosmetics.
A skincare brand couldn’t sell beauty ingestibles, they said. We lacked the expertise. Retail wouldn’t understand it. Customers wouldn’t understand it.
So we developed I66 The Beauty Fountain – the world’s first combination of hydroxytyrosol and bioactive collagen peptides.
After that, we developed I70 The Beauty Molecule with hydroxytyrosol and hyaluronic acid.
Again, we did exactly what we had been advised against.
Today, our facial care, the Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line, and the drinkable beauty products I66 and I70 are among our bestsellers.
Not because we ignored the experts.
But because we had the courage not to believe them.
If I had listened to them, there would be no Waterless Beauty.
No I66.
No I70.
No Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line.
Maybe Oliveda wouldn’t even exist anymore.

We’re not turning back

The treehouse was not a marketing concept.
It was chaos.
Doubt.
Despair.
Obsession.
Love.
And the almost crazy faith of one man in the power of olive trees.
I had no experience.
No plan.
No guarantee.
But I had the olive trees.
They became my teachers. They gave me direction when I didn’t know what to do next. And whenever I wanted to give up, they sent me a sign.
You don’t reach the next level by doing what everyone considers reasonable.
The next level begins where reasonable people turn back.
We’re not turning back.

Happy Birthday, OLIVEDA.