Anthony Wilson is the Managing Director of Nood: a proud majority-owned Aboriginal business creating natural, environmentally-friendly range of cleaning, home, and personal care products. Each formula features native Australian botanicals, helping to tell the stories of these ingredients from an Aboriginal perspective.
To celebrate Indigenous Business Month, we spoke with Anthony to hear more about the journey of Nood.
I grew up in a little place called Saulsbury in Adelaide with my family and 7 siblings.
We are from a few different communities across South Australia. We are Ngarrindjeri people from the southeast coast of South Australia. We’re also Kaurna people from the Adelaide plains. I have ties to Narungga people over on the Yorke Peninsula, and also have ties to Arrente people up in Alice Springs through my grandmother.
I’m most passionate about building community. I am a massive believer in building up the community with tools to build their own self-worth and self-sufficiency and moving forward in trying to create a generation of wealth for us.
What inspired me to create Nood was to create something different and unique that hadn’t really been out in the market yet — utilising native Australian botanicals, and telling the story of something that’s been around First Nations people for a very long time. That was my focus and my inspiration for creating Nood.
Now you’re seeing a lot of people using native botanicals in various different ways such as food and drinks, but there was no one really at the time doing it in the space of hand hygiene in cleaning products or body care products.
Nood is all about bringing profit, and purpose together to prove that they aren’t mutually exclusive.
I guess for me, Nood’s purpose is really going back to bringing First Nations agriculture and harvesting together. I’m really, really pushing that and moving that forward. My big purpose is actually the not-for-profit that I’ve created — to build a pool of money to give back to the community, and using it in a way to help build community out.
Telling the stories of native Australian botanicals, telling stories of where they come from, the importance of why we use these certain Natives in certain ways — that’s all the amazing parts about Nood and what we are trying to achieve.
For me, it’s understanding that First Nations people in harvesting only really make up 1% of harvesting right across Australia. So trying to build that up and change that story, giving them an opportunity to take control of their own destiny.
We’ve recently changed our foundation’s name to the Miwi Project. At the moment we’re still a very young business and we haven’t really been able to support anything at the moment, but we really want to have the opportunity to do that, and we’re looking forward to giving back to our community in the near future.
We’re also having great conversations with some really big brands thanks to Ngarrimili, and hopefully, we can collaborate with them in the very near future. Everything is still a work in progress, but we’ll get there.
