Hiya! Happy Sunday and welcome to Nour’s first newsletter!
It’s me, Annie, founder of Nour :) I’m writing to you from my sunny little corner in Los Angeles California, soaking up this slow 78 degree weekend, I’m drinking my nourishing little elixir sea moss smoothie, listening to the birds chirping outside my window and Chuck Johnson play the banjo…hehe thank you world 🤭
Before I dive in, I just want to say thank you for being here, many of you subscribed many moons ago when Nour was just a teeny tiny baby brand (lol we still are 🤭) but so much has happened in the last few years that I would love to catch you up on!
Many of you I have the pleasure of personally knowing, and you are familiar with Nour’s birthing story, and some of you are floating in the ether one or two degrees away from me and maybe we will meet soon…lets start from the beginning.
Nour stands for nourishment and I started creating it back in 2020 during the pandemic shortly after moving to the Los Angeles and realizing the Santa Ana winds were making my skin as dry as the desert. To be honest with you I didn’t set out to create Nour, I just stumbled upon it within my own personal ritual of massaging and moisturizing my own skin. Believe it or not, Nour started with body butter and the ritual of touching your own body. What it means to take things slow, slow enough to moisturize your skin before running out the door or slow enough to massage your skin before going to bed. An act of self love, my intention was to create more of a conversation around my belief - that the most important relationship to nourish is the one you have with yourself.
About a year and a half later it’s June 2021..and a lot had changed. I was spending so much time in my little West Hollywood bungalow kitchen, hosting many dinner parties, having friends over all the time for meals, romanticizing these little moments and the fact that I had a place of my own in Los Angeles. Friends and family knew I had been making this salad dressing for many moons, and they started asking for pints of it at a time. I have always been someone who makes my own salad dressing, I have always been someone who finds themself in the kitchen (ever since I was a young girl). I’m not sure when it started, but I just find joy in making my own things if I can. I have an affinity to know how things are made, and my favorite show growing up was “Unwrapped” on Food Network. Okay side tangent over, clearly this love to make my own things migrated to the food landscape and specifically salad dressing.
I find the ones on the shelf to completely boring and fall flat in the flavor department, it always bothered me that the second ingredient was often times sugar and they are usually made with seed oils that I didn’t care to put inside my body. So this began my journey of making my own salad dressings, like many of us do.
I knew I wanted to reinvent the flavor wheel, cross pollinate cultural flavor palettes, bring excitement and color to our plates and essentially be salads new PR rep! I want people to look at Nour on a shelf and say wtf that sounds delicious and I have a million recipe ideas in my head right now, or I have no idea how I’m going to use it but I cant wait to bring it home and experiment in the kitchen! Nour is an extension of me and what I love, but in 16 oz bottle form — a reason to bring together the best things life has to offer — good food, good company, Bossa nova, candle light, and never ending laughter and hugs. That’s the magic of Nour, because when you combine food and community, something really powerful happens. My year living in the Middle East taught me that, but more on that another time.
I remember the day Biden won the election, we partied in the streets in Silverlake on Sunset Blvd all day and then we went back to my cousins house and I made the OG Lemon Caper Salad Dressing and we ate a big ass salad while watching Kamala’s speech. Nour was always destined to grow and evolve with me, as I have, and it has been an extremely hard and rewarding last few years.
Since launching my first salad dressing back in July 2022, Nour has grown so much! We have created 3 flavors! Our OG that most of you know and love, Lemon Caper 💛 Our second flavor, Yuzu Zaatar launched last summer as a limited collab with YuzuCo which was absolutely insane and so many of you started making “savory parfaits” which was really fun to see. And then most recently and the star of many of your dining tables and WFH lunches, our third and beloved Sumac Serrano Green Goddess launched October 2023 and has been a huge expander for Nour, catching the eyes of many hungry people looking for healthy and exciting flavors of dressing for their salad and more. If I had a dollar for every time someone told me they were drizzling Nour on their Sweetgreen salad…🌀🥹 Then maybe I could exit lol JK!
I even threw a huge launch dinner at my house with 20 of my closest friends to celebrate our new flavor! All of my favorite brands were even gracious enough to send product and joined the party like Ghia, Fishwife, Graza, Our Place, Cocojune, Bathing Culture, Necessarie, Social Hummus, Pure Beauty, Maude (for the goodie bag not the dinner table, thx to our queen Dakota Johnson) 🌶️ and more 🤲👁🥲
As of today, you can find us in about 25 stores across California, and Nour has taken a first class ticket all the way to NOUR YORK 🍎 and landed on the shelves of Happier Grocery, Erewhon’s East Coast cousin. Thank you Snaxshot for this intro and so much more. We have collabed with friends at shoppy shops, popped up at summer soirées, invited you to join us for salad workshops in collaboration with Usal and Lettuce Grow, holiday markets, and more brand events than I can count 😵💫 We have been featured in Snaxshot, Thingtesting, and as of late Vogue has been reaching out…👀 Check out my interview with Just Black Denim and keep an eye out for a really exciting one coming this Spring! OOF I fee like I barely scratched the surface too 🥵 I am so grateful to have met so many of you along the way. A special shout out to my community of extraordinary friends and friends of friends of friends who have shown me nothing but bounties of love, support and encouragement. You know who you are 🫶
So here we are, me myself and I. I finally feel inspired to write to you all. But this newsletter is going to be a lot different than any other brand’s emails you’re subscribed to. Instead of bombarding you with promotional gibberish and marketing campaigns, this is going to be a space where we will all come together to explore and share all things nourishment with our community. Everything Nour stands for. Nourishment from the inside out - blue zone living, dopamine dressing, recipes, rituals, connection, the correlation of sunshine + health, podcasts, books and everything that makes life worth living for 🌈 All that I ask is that you come to this space with an open mind, and a craving to be curious. Even if we don’t know each other, please feel free to leave comments and let me know what resonated, what you loved, what you’re craving more of, DM me, email me, submit your own recipes or dopamine dressing spotting! Noursletter is for all of us, and I hope you have a nourishing rest of your day, wherever that is 🤲 I’m so happy you’re here!
BIG LOVE and chat soon 💛
Annie
The smile across my face is LARGE after reading this special substack ! ! ! I’m so inspired by you, Annie. The Noursletter should be required reading for anyone who feels passionately about wellness, discovery, and (most importantly) nourishment <3
💛