Less than a year-and-a-half after opening Thrive Apothecary CBD shop in Fort Worth’s Foundry District, the owners are growing their cannabis oil empire. Wife-and-husband team Dr. Lisa Gardner and Trey Phillips have just launched WelCel, a premium line of full-spectrum hemp CBD oil products.
The collection currently includes CBD oil drops, vegan soft gels, a topical roll-on formula, and pet-specific hemp CBD oil blend — all organic, GMO-free, and double lab-tested to meet exacting standards. They are priced between $60 (for 250-milligram pet CBD oil) and $300 (for a 300-milligram hemp CBD oil).
The products are being sold two ways: on the WelCel website and through their direct-sales brand partners, such as Rodan + Fields.
As a physician, Gardner says, her passion for providing the highest quality plant-based wellness products drove her to be intimately involved in the products’ creation — from seed to cell, she says.
“This amazing brand is the culmination of more than two decades of a medical career rooted in research and patient focused care,” she says in a release. „I believe as both a physician and a product user that hemp CBD oil is the next evolution in healthy living.”
WelCel products infuse cannabidiol (CBD) with natural, healthy ingredients like ginger, turmeric, peppermint, and essential oils.
Phillips, WelCel president and co-founder, says he’s seen first-hand how purveyors in the booming CBD oil market have failed to provide safe, accessible products.
„In the unregulated market of CBD, it was clear to us that most of the competitive companies were taking advantage of not having strict regulations that held them accountable when creating a great product for their clients,” he says. „After researching countless company lab reports, I realized our community deserves something better. They deserved a cleaner formula that was held to the highest standards.”
When they opened Thrive Apothecary in October 2018, the couple touted their shop as different thanks to Gardner’s medical background (she is a board certified physician and founder of Fusion Medical Aesthetics) and Phillips’ tactical experience as a retired Fort Worth Police Department sergeant who served as a SWAT team leader.
Thrive sells a full line of CBD-enriched edibles, wellness serums, hair-skin-body lines, and a full pet health line of products.
Short for cannabidiol, CBD oil is a compound found in cannabis plants, aka marijuana. It’s made by extracting CBD from the cannabis plant, then combining it with an oil such as hemp oil to make it easy to consume. It’s low in THC, the ingredient in marijuana that gets you high, but fans use it to treat everything from insomnia to pain management to calming their pets.
The CBD market has exploded in recent years, with dedicated shops cropping up all over Fort Worth. It’s even sold in mass-market stores like CVS and Kroger now.