20 Years of Hemp Tim Barford started UK Hemp Company Yaoh on Valentine’s Day 2002. With the 20th anniversary of this much loved and treasured independent vegan company now approaching, Tim steps up to the Plant Powered Planet microphone to relay the Yaoh story of the first 20 years – and what’s still to come. Origins Yaoh began officially on February 14th (Valentines Day) 2002. That’s the day I officially launched the business. It wasn’t until August that year that we got our first products out a bottle of shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, 3 lip balms, a moisturiser and the salve. Getting the products sourced, packaged and manufactured was a process, for sure. The initial response was good, we were one of the first products not to be using parabens or sodium lauryl sulphate, we were vegan and we were hemp. Throw in some verve, freshness and colour and yeah, Yaoh made a splash from day one. Wild Oats in Bristol was the first store to stock us, in August 2002 we were on the shelves for the first 54 I Plant Powered Planet
time. January 2003 we were taken on by our first distributor Queenswood, meaning we were accessible for thousands of independent health stores, and by that summer we had done our first Trade show, got taken on by a several more distributors, and launched our sunblock. Lift-off. And in summer 2003, Fred started working with us as a Saturday job (he runs Yaoh these days) and we started the first vegan event. Happy days. Before Yaoh 1991, and my pal launched House of Hemp – that was it, right on it. We set off for Romania to visit the hemp farms there in February 1991 but got snowed under in Amsterdam, and never made it further. But I continued down the industrial hemp line, mainly from an information point, up until 1994 when I opened
the UK’s first dedicated hemp shop, importing hemp product from USA, Netherlands, & Germany especially. From there we launched an urban hemp clothes label (Alessandro Dasosa) in 1995. Highlights of that era included our hemp fashion shows which we took to Heaven in London and then the Melkweg in Amsterdam. There was a blossoming global hemp scene in the mid 90’s, with at the height of this boom around 70 hemp companies exhibiting at the Biofach in Frankfurt in 1995. But it didn’t last for many of us, and gradually over the next few years a lot of us went out of business – myself included. I dusted myself down, learnt how to use a spreadsheet and what a working margin was, and launched Yaoh in 2002, and haven’t looked back.
