Canna Health Amsterdam

What it is

Canna Health Amsterdam is a CBD and botanicals brand from Amsterdam: oils in a range of strengths and CBG/CBN blends, gummies, isolate, cosmetics — a face serum, a muscle balm, massage oils — and a wholesale line for shops across Europe. Sixty-odd products, sold to consumers through its own webshop and to trade customers from Greece to Poland on account.

It is also one of the hardest niches on the internet to market in. Google and Meta will not run ads for it. Marketplaces will not list it. Payment providers are nervous. And the rules on what you may say about a wellness product are strict and enforced. Everything the brand earns online, it earns by being found, trusted and easy to buy from — which is exactly the kind of problem we like.

What we did

Brand and product. The identity, and then the product itself as a designed object: names, a labelling system that holds together across sixty products and four categories, packaging, and the product pages that have to do the selling because no ad ever will. Product videos for launches. One visual language from the label on the bottle to the invoice in a wholesaler's inbox.

The shop, all custom. WordPress and WooCommerce as the base, because the team runs it daily — and everything on top written by us: our own theme, our own plugins, no page builder, no freemium stack. Fast on a phone, clear about strengths and doses, and built to stay inside the rules on claims without reading like a legal notice.

The back office nobody sees. An order-manager dashboard that replaces WooCommerce's cluttered admin with one screen for fulfilment: tracking, carrier routing, a watchlist for parcels that stopped moving or got stuck in customs, and automated recovery of payments that failed. A separate wholesale invoicing application — own build, own database — that knows each trade customer's VAT treatment (Dutch VAT, EU reverse charge, export), minimum order quantities, standing discounts and payment terms, produces numbered invoices and credit notes as PDFs, and took over the ninety-odd trade accounts from the old shop after we cleaned their records by hand. Plus the support playbook the team works from, so a customer question gets the same good answer whoever picks it up.

Search in a restricted niche. With paid channels closed, organic search is the business. Technical SEO on the shop, structured data, local visibility in Amsterdam, and product and guide pages written to answer what buyers actually ask — strengths, differences between CBD, CBG and CBN, how to use a balm versus an oil — carefully worded to stay within what may be claimed. Measurement set up honestly, so the team knows which pages bring orders, without a single euro of ad spend to muddy the picture.

Why it matters for your project

If your product cannot be advertised — or simply should not depend on ads — Canna Health Amsterdam shows what the alternative looks like: a brand that earns its customers through the site, a shop that converts without tricks, a back office that keeps the founders out of spreadsheets, and search work that respects the rules of a difficult category. The same approach works for clinics, financial services, supplements and anything else the ad platforms keep at arm's length.

Selling something the platforms won't touch? Tell us what it is.