Our Story

built from the soil up.

A wellness company built on pillars, not promises — from the ground that grows it, to the science that proves it, to the body that needs to stay well.

  • thecary was founded by Tinashe, known to almost everyone as Tee. He grew up around his family’s farm, where breakfast came from the garden and the body’s relationship to the soil was simply how life worked. Fruits and vegetables had taste, weight, and colour. Nothing arrived out of season. Nothing was flown in from somewhere far away to sit on a shelf for two weeks before reaching the table.

    It was only later, once Tee moved to the United Kingdom, that he realised how strange that had become almost everywhere else. How rarely food arrived with its nutrition still intact. How much had quietly slipped from what the rest of the world considered normal.

    By adulthood, life was at full pace — the kind of pace many people now live by default.

  • American football on the weekends. A business to run on weekdays. A second degree to finish in the evenings. Modern life asks a great deal of those who take it seriously. From the outside it looked impressive. From the inside it was quietly emptying him.

    The burnout came hard. And in the long search back to health — reading every study, trialling every supplement, tracing every ingredient to its source — a rib broke. In two places. It was the body doing what no warning sign, no friend’s worry, no diary entry could do: forcing a stop. In that stillness, a conclusion arrived with absolute clarity. Nobody should have to wait for their body to break before they start taking care of it. And nobody should have to leave the city behind to remember what food was supposed to taste like.

    That conclusion became thecary.

  • The human body, given the right inputs, is extraordinarily good at keeping itself well. Ancient cultures knew it. They built whole systems of medicine around the idea that food, minerals, movement, and rest, taken seriously, would carry a person through a long and capable life. The work of healing was rare because the work of staying well was constant.

  • Modern life has quietly reversed that order. The World Health Organization estimates that up to 90 per cent of heart disease — the leading cause of death worldwide — is preventable through diet, movement, and the absence of harm. Around 70 per cent of global deaths now come from non-communicable diseases, most of them linked to poor nutrition and lifestyle. We have built a system that treats illness brilliantly and prevents it badly, then wonders why we keep getting sicker.

"the most important wellness work is the work done before anything goes wrong."

  • The reason staying well has become so much harder is not mysterious. The food does less of the work than it once did. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that a third of the world’s soil is now degraded, and the equivalent of one football pitch of topsoil erodes every five seconds.

  • The apple on the shelf today carries up to half the nutrition it held two generations ago, with iron, calcium, and magnesium levels in common fruits and vegetables falling by as much as 50 per cent since 1950. The water moving through modern systems has been recycled and stripped of the minerals that once made it medicine.

  • The body still needs what it always needed. The food has simply stopped delivering it. Supplementation, done properly, is no longer an indulgence — it is how the gap gets closed. It is how a body in 2026 receives what a body in 1926 could get from breakfast.

Real luxury, in thecary’s view, is preventative, and almost always functional. It is the daily routine that means you do not end up in a clinic at fifty. It is the clinical dose that actually works in the body, not the marketing dose that looks good on a label. It is the bioavailable form, not the cheaper one the body cannot absorb. It is the certificate of analysis published, never buried. It is the linen on the bed, the hemp in the curtain, the wool underfoot — natural fibres chosen for their breathability, their relationship to the skin, and the centuries of bedside use that recommended them long before synthetic alternatives existed. It is honesty, applied with discipline, until the result speaks for itself in the body that takes it.

The world has used these plants and minerals for thousands of years to keep people well, not to rescue them once they were not. Shilajit is described in the Charaka Samhita, the foundational Ayurvedic text written more than two thousand years ago, where it is classified as a Rasayana — a substance taken in good health, daily, to keep the body resilient. Adaptogens have been carried through Ayurvedic, Tibetan, and Chinese traditions for just as long. Across the African continent, baobab, moringa, rooibos, and African potato have done the same quiet work for centuries, sustaining communities with little fanfare and less recognition in the modern wellness conversation.

thecary has gone back to all of it — to the corners of the earth where this knowledge was first born, including the ones the modern wellness conversation has been slower to recognise — and brought it forward with the rigour modern science demands.

What can be grown on the farm is grown on the farm. What belongs elsewhere is sourced from where each thing has always been at its best, through the people who have known it longest. The standards do not bend. Whether the journey is twenty metres or twenty thousand, every ingredient passes through the same gate.

"ancient practice. modern rigour. daily wellness, done properly — not as rescue, but as routine."

  • thecary’s longest commitment is to a farm. Not a marketing farm. Not a clinical retreat dressed as one. A real working farm where the botanicals that belong in this soil grow under our own care, the food on the plate is harvested at sunrise, and the people who come to stay sleep above the very soil that holds part of their daily routine together. The UN reports that ninety-five per cent of the food humans eat originates in the soil. thecary’s view is that the experience of staying well should originate from there too.

    It is also a place to come and live for a while. In hand-built chalets shaped from stone, timber, and clay drawn from the land they sit on — warm, quiet, low to the ground, dressed inside in linen, hemp, and wool. The pools are not chlorinated rectangles. They are natural-bathing systems filtered by aquatic plants and gravel, the way water has always cleaned itself. Every light, every warmth, every running tap is powered by the sun and held by the land. Luxury, here, does not extract from nature — it participates in it.

  • The animals are part of the experience because they are part of the cycle. Guests walk goats through olive groves at dusk. Feed ostriches from an open hand. Ride horses whose grazing keeps the grasslands alive. The spa draws its waters and its botanicals from the farm itself — treatments mixed from what was growing twenty metres from the treatment room. The intent throughout is the same one that defines the supplement range: to close the distance between the body and the land that keeps it well.

    The cost of preventable illness to the world economy is projected to reach 47 trillion dollars by 2030. The cost of taking your health seriously now — in what you eat, drink, put on your skin, and the place you go to reset before the body insists — is a fraction of that. In every sense of the word.

2 · 2 · 2022

The day thecary came into being

“we are not owners of the land. We are mere keepers. And it is our job to look after it, rebuild it, rewild it — and let nature take its time to provide a healthier future for all of us.”