Amy Duncan

When Amy Duncan first founded the CBD wellness company Mowellens, she made a commitment to the purity of her products with a limited initial range of five edible CBD oils and honey.
That same dedication will carry through now that Mowellens is, according to Duncan, about to become something much bigger, with a second phase that will see the launch of ten new beauty products—tripling its offerings—and a rebrand as a “supercharged skincare company.” In 2012, Duncan, a born-and-raised Midwesterner, was in her hometown of St. Louis working as a medical sales representative when her husband, Chris Duncan of the St. Louis Cardinals, was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. “It turned our lives upside down,” Duncan says. After Chris’ cancer responded to months of treatment, the family moved to California, where Duncan began working at a biotech and clinical laboratory as the director of sales and marketing. Curious about the cannabis industry—CBD in particular, because of its documentation as helping with seizures, something Chris was dealing with—she began testing for clean, pure products and researching dispensaries. Back then, she says, “Nothing was being lab tested. And nothing was clean.” A couple months later, in October 2016, after her husband’s brain tumor had been gone for four years, the cancer was back. That’s when “I said, ‘I’m never working for anybody else again,’” Duncan recalls. “So I left and I started Mowellens.” Boosted by her research and inspired by the positive effects of CBD in her personal life (and in the midst of a huge wave of CBD and hemp companies launching in the wellness and beauty industries), Duncan created Mowellens as a CBD source that focuses on the care, concern, and quality of its products—no shortcuts. It’s what sets Mowellens apart from the rest. Pulling from her experiences on all sides of the medical and wellness industries, Duncan says one of the brand’s main focuses is to “educate about the industry and how important it is to get a product that is clean.” In that vein, “We do not only formulate with the best hemp extract and distill it,” she continues, “but we also have the same diligence with the other ingredients that surround hemp in the formulas.” Now, with the brand’s new CBD skincare line, Duncan’s goal is to “reframe what it means to feel OK,” and she says time spent using good, pure skincare products can be part of that. “We really want to empower people to know that OK is enough.”