I didn't set out to build a wellness brand. I set out to fix myself. Everything after that was an accident with good timing.
I've always been what I call an eternal thinker. A Capricorn — harder on the outside than people realise, a lot more sensitive underneath. In my early twenties I lost one of my closest friends, one of three of us who did absolutely everything together. That loss opened me to a different kind of knowing — energy work, the esoteric, the things you can't see or measure — and that journey has never stopped. The Ankh has been with me for as long as I can remember. I wear it tattooed on my arm, and I believe I've lived before, in ancient Egypt, and that this symbol found me again for a reason. It isn't a logo. It's a lineage.
Seven years ago I looked in the mirror and thought: this is not the version of me I agreed to. A hundred kilos. Lethargic. Going through the motions.
So I did the obvious thing. Trained hard. Cleaned up my diet. Did it properly. Still didn't see what I expected. So I went the other route. Faster. Riskier. And it worked — for a while. But I was half-living. Wired, not well.
That's when the real question arrived: what does the body actually need to function properly — without forcing it, without faking it?
I went looking. Years of long-haul flights and time zones had already taught me that my whole body ran on a clock I kept ignoring. Before long I was spending R3,000 a month on five, six, seven different products — and some months still didn't have the full picture. There was good stuff out there. But everything was sold alone. One bottle, one fix. Nobody had designed any of it to work together.
Then something I'd built collapsed. Suddenly, and for reasons that had nothing to do with the work. What was left behind was one clarifying question:
“What would I build if nobody else had a say?”
So I went deep. Months of meditating, researching, and long phone calls with my best friend in the UK — the third in our group, who still makes me think differently from the other side of the world.
Then came the kitchen counter. My first blend crammed four mushrooms into one formula. Spread that thin, nothing was at a dose that meant anything. So I pulled it apart. One mushroom as the foundation, at a meaningful dose, everything around it there for a reason. Less, done properly, beats more, done half-arsed. Not one formula trying to do everything — three. Cognition for the morning. Vitality for the afternoon. Harmony for the evening.
That's my day now. Plunger coffee to start. Vitality at 1pm — tea, yes, even me, the coffee guy — or capsules when I'm out. Harmony tea after work, incense lit, music on low. I used to set alarms for all three. Don't need them anymore.
I don't fit a box. Bagpipes and botanicals. Spiritual, but not religious. Took me a while to realise that was never the problem.
Nootroceutics is built on three things I learned the hard way: empathy, honesty, and a genuine love of people. The Ankh Principles — Education, Integration, Ritual, Integrity — aren't a marketing framework. They're how I try to live, and every product in this range is held to them.
When you pick one up, I want you to feel that someone made it for you with care. Someone who sat in the difficult part, did the work, and came out the other side wanting to help.
That's what this is.
— Gary Mustard, Founder and CEO