23 years of OLIVEDA (born August 23, 2003). The dream of becoming an olive farmer, by Thomas

After I had healed myself through the power of the olive trees, I could not simply return to my old life.
I felt called.
Not to start another company. Not to sell another product.
I wanted to become an olive farmer.
To me, this path felt completely right. To everyone else, it sounded completely insane.
My family and the people around me tried to talk some sense into me.
You have no experience.
You know nothing about growing olives.
You are German. You do not come from a family of olive farmers.
This is not a plan. It is just a crazy dream.
They were right about all of it.
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 for me.
So I chose to go against everyone’s advice – including my own family’s.
I went to Florence.
Not because I knew what I was supposed to do there.
But because I knew I could not remain where I was.
For six months in Florence, I tried to move closer to my dream of becoming an olive farmer.
For six months, nothing worked.
No breakthrough. No confirmation. No sign that I had made the right decision.
Slowly, it began to look as if everyone else had been right.
Maybe I really had followed nothing more than a crazy dream.
Eventually, I reached the end.
I decided to give up and return to Germany. Back to a reasonable life. Back to the world everyone had warned me not to leave.
The decision was made.
And then someone rang my doorbell.
For the very first time.
A priest was standing outside.
He held an olive branch in his hand.
He blessed me.
A priest. An olive branch. At the exact moment I had decided to abandon the path of the olive trees.
You can call that a coincidence.
I could not.
To me, it was a sign.
As if the olive trees themselves were saying:
You are not finished.
Keep going.
So I kept going.

The Craziest Laboratory in the World

In 2001, a treehouse built in an olive tree became my laboratory.
There were no white coats. No sterile walls. No scientific team and no finished plan.
Everywhere there were bottles, jars, olive leaves, bark, roots and countless experiments.
I mixed. I discarded. I started again.
Bottles flew.
Some mixtures foamed over.
Some exploded.
It was loud. Wild. Chaotic.
No scientist was following a known formula here. This was one man fighting for an idea no one else believed in.
I did not simply want to extract the power of the olive tree.
I wanted to preserve it.
I wanted to create an elixir that carried the vitality of these ancient trees and reached people from within.
But it did not work.
One attempt followed another. Hundreds became thousands. Again and again, the answer seemed within reach. Again and again, it failed.
There were nights filled with hope and days filled with despair.
Moments when giving up would have been the only reasonable thing to do.
But reason does not create something the world has never seen before.
So I kept going.
Until one day, it worked.
In the middle of that chaos, I01 was born – the first Oliveda product.
Not a cream.
A green, intensely bitter, drinkable cell elixir powered by the olive tree.
Beauty from within.

And Then Came the Silence

I01 was finished.
But no one knew this product except me.
No one knew what this green elixir was. And I had no idea how people would respond to it.
I sent out several 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 became.
Maybe I had been wrong.
Maybe it had all been nothing more than a crazy dream.
Maybe everyone else had been right after all.
Once again, I thought about giving up.
Just as I had in Florence.
But whenever I came close to abandoning my path, the trees were there. The signs of nature would come – sometimes quietly, sometimes so clearly that I could not ignore them.
And suddenly, the first testimonials arrived.
People reported extraordinary changes. Powerful before-and-after experiences followed and were later documented through medically supervised examinations.
After all those weeks of silence, it felt as though the olive trees were answering again.
Not through a priest holding an olive branch.
This time, they spoke through people.
The message was the same:
You are not finished.
Keep going.

More Than a Product Was Born in the Treehouse

I01 was only the beginning.
The experiences people shared would not let me go. They led me to the next crazy idea: to create something completely holistic, working from the inside out and from the outside in at the same time.
That is how Olive Tree Therapy – my Mediterranean answer to Ayurveda – was intuitively born in the treehouse.
There was no textbook.
No finished treatment plan.
No scientific instruction manual.
Only my experience, my intuition and what the olive trees had taught me.
In the treehouse, I developed enemas using high-quality extra virgin olive oil.
Full-body wraps made from finely ground olive leaves – the same green powder that, many years later, became our Olive Matcha.
Wraps made from pureed black olives.
Oil pulling with high-quality extra virgin olive oil as a ritual for the mouth and gums.
And the Olive Tree Meditation, in which a person becomes still, feels their own roots again and consciously connects with the tree.
What first looked like a collection of completely insane ideas gradually became a holistic system.
A few years later, we brought the Olive Tree Therapy developed in the treehouse to the Oliveda Spa in Mallorca.
There, the vision became real.
People were examined before the therapy began and again two weeks later. The extraordinary before-and-after results were documented and confirmed under conventional medical supervision.
What had been created in a treehouse without prior knowledge, without a textbook and without permission suddenly became visible.
And measurable.

Then I Thought About Creams for the First Time

I imagined luxurious spas where people could experience Olive Tree Therapy.
But for that, I needed more than I01.
So, for the first time in my life, I began thinking about creams.
I knew nothing about cosmetics. I did not know how creams were made. I had never even consciously realized that something like a dedicated eye cream existed.
So I started researching.
I discovered that in 1911, a stable oil-and-water-based cream could be industrially produced on a large scale for the first time.
That invention revolutionized cosmetics.
But it also led to water gradually becoming the main ingredient in countless skincare products.
I studied the ingredient lists of modern creams.
Water appeared first almost everywhere.
At first, I did not know what that meant.
Then I learned that the first ingredient usually represents the largest share of a product.
In many creams, that meant as much as 70 or 80 percent water.
I was stunned.
Water?
For almost a century, hardly anyone had questioned this foundation.
But I did not come from the cosmetics industry. I had never learned its rules.
And perhaps that was exactly why I could break them.
I asked one simple question:
Why not replace the water with the cell elixir of the olive leaf?
Why should the foundation of a cream be almost entirely inactive water when it could instead carry the concentrated power of the olive tree?
In that moment, Waterless Beauty was born.
I01 had opened the way from within.
Waterless skincare opened it from the outside.
From the inside out.
From the outside in.
Olive Tree Therapy was complete.

A Word No One Could Pronounce

Back then, almost no one knew what hydroxytyrosol was.
Long before the ingredient became publicly known, and long before the EFSA officially evaluated the significance 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 told us to choose something shorter, prettier and easier to sell.
We did the opposite.
We wrote the word on our products:
HYDROXYTYROSOL.
Long.
Complicated.
Impossible to ignore.
That is how our Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line was born.
We did not hide the defining ingredient somewhere in a long ingredient list. We made it the center of an entire skincare line.
We did not only have to explain what our products could do.
First, we had to teach people how to pronounce their most important ingredient.

What the Experts Said Was Impossible

Beauty experts had warned me not to begin with facial skincare.
Too difficult.
Too many giant brands.
No chance for someone who knew nothing about creams.
I did it anyway.
Later, retailers warned us against drinkable beauty.
A skincare brand could not sell beauty ingestibles, they said. We lacked the expertise. Retailers would not understand it. Customers would not understand it.
So we developed I66 The Beauty Fountain – the world’s first combination of hydroxytyrosol and bioactive collagen peptides.
Then we developed I70 The Beauty Molecule with hydroxytyrosol and hyaluronic acid.
Once again, we did exactly what we had been told not to do.
Today, our facial skincare, our Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line and our drinkable beauty products I66 and I70 are among our bestsellers.
Not despite ignoring the experts.
But because we had the courage not to believe them.
Had I listened, there would be no Waterless Beauty.
No I66.
No I70.
No Hydroxytyrosol Corrective line.
Perhaps Oliveda would no longer exist at all.

We Do Not Turn Back

The treehouse was not a marketing concept.
It was chaos.
Doubt.
Despair.
Obsession.
Love.
And one man’s almost insane belief in the power of the 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 did not know where to go. And whenever I wanted to give up, they sent me a sign.
You do not reach the next level by doing what everyone considers reasonable.
The next level begins where reasonable people turn back.
We do not turn back.

Happy Birthday, OLIVEDA.