The Story of RESTART CBD

Back in 2015, Shayda Torabi Howell was hit by a car while crossing the street here in Austin, breaking her pelvis in two places, and changing the trajectory of her life forever.

In the months that followed, doctors offered her every conventional solution for the pain – steroid injections, opioids, even surgery.

But it wasn’t until she started experimenting with various doses of THC and CBD that she found any lasting relief. 

A life-long Austinite, she’d long-been familiar with the recreational side of the cannabis family.

“Live music capital of the world, Willie Nelson, and pot,” she laughed. “They all really go hand-in-hand. Growing up I had a very transactional relationship with cannabis.”

But in the wake of the accident, she found that wasn’t enough.

“I liked the feeling of the THC,” she said. “That definitely has applications to pain relief and sleep and recovery. But without a fully-baked understanding of different doses, different form factors, different, you know, combinations of cannabinoids, I wasn't fully utilizing what THC could do.”

THC, CBD, CBG, CBN; all told, the cannabis plant has more than a hundred of these cannabinoids, many with legitimate medical uses. But this was still two years before hemp would be federally legalized, and three years before it was legal in Texas, so there wasn’t a lot of great info out there. 

She had to learn everything through self-experimentation.

Over time, she started seeing results, and that caught the attention of her younger sister, Sydney.

A fitness instructor and collegiate swimmer at UT majoring in nutrition, she was in many ways the yin to Shayda’s yang.

“She grew up, not like me, going to concerts and enjoying cannabis,” Shayda said. “She was getting drug tested.” Any substance use could have wrecked her sports career.

But the healing results her sister was seeing from non-psychoactive CBD were impossible to ignore, and she began exploring the implications for rest and recovery in athletes.

By that time, there were early hints that CBD might be the health industry’s new darling – Dr. Oz had done an entire episode on it, and Juiceland had added it to the menu – but for many, it was still viewed as a kind of snake oil.

“She really approached it from [a fitness perspective],” Shayda told me. “Understanding ingredients, understanding labels, making people feel comfortable with what’s in their product.”

Before long, both were sharing what they’d learned online.

Then, around 2018, a few things happened in quick succession.

The federal government legalized hemp – which contains all the same cannabinoids as marijuana, but in different ratios (so it’s a different plant).

Sydney and Shayda began developing their own hemp-derived CBD product based on what they’d learned from years of self experimentation.

And Shayda lost her job.

Still relatively fresh off a major medical injury, her parents urged her to find another, if only for the health benefits, and to build their new CBD business on the side. 

One company even offered to design the perfect role around her experience in tech – a six figure comp-package, benefits, travel, her own podcast, everything – but the business called to her.

“My parents are small business entrepreneurs,” she told me. “They own a small insurance agency. I grew up watching Shark Tank, and was just kind of like, When is it my chance to, like, enter the conversation?”

So instead, she convinced Sydney to lean in with her, and the two of them officially launched RESTART CBD.

Their first shop was the tiny front room of their parents’ insurance agency. Their first big break? A phone call from KVUE News for an upcoming segment.

Shayda and Sydney had always been good at spotting consumer trends. They’d noticed rising demand around CBD for pets, and had even developed a line for their dog Scotty, that helped him in his older age.

The KVUE team ran almost an entire segment on their shop titled, “CBD Craze: Would you use CBD on your pets?” (which, side note, turned out about as funny as you’d expect).

“They made it like a hit piece,” Shayda laughed, recalling the somewhat skeptical interviews with pet owners at parks around town. “But that kind of started a spiral of getting different media outlets to talk with us, and obviously consumers who were like, ‘Hey, I saw you on the news!’”

They were off to the races.

Building from there hasn’t been easy.

“Cannabis is still super stigmatized and censored,” she told me. “I’ve had my personal Instagram taken down… Same thing with RESTART’s Instagram – we lost the ability to go live, we can’t collaborate with people to make our posts go further.

“There's a lot of limitations that we deal with being in this industry that make it really challenging to effectively market.”

Simply accepting money is still a huge challenge in the space.

Even though they’re fully licensed, and the products they sell are legal, they’re not allowed to use PayPal or Stripe as a payment processor. They can’t even have a personal account on those platforms because they own this business.

When they first opened, they used Elavon, which infamously later pulled the rug out from under the industry in 2019.

Barely escaping intact, they were lucky to land a spot with Square’s experimental work with cannabis sellers. Then Square dropped them too. 

“They gave me thirty days’ notice to re-platform my POS,” she told me. “It was right as I was getting married and heading out of the state, and my final turn off day was Black Friday.”

To try and develop support for the industry, Shayda and her sisters are involved in a lot of advocacy work. She’s the president of the Texas Hemp Coalition, the leading nonprofit coalition working on behalf of the industry in Texas.

“Texas has had 3 legislative sessions since we've been in business, and since the industry has been legal,” she told me. “All three, we've tried to push for progress, and it keeps getting stunted in legislation.”

For example, after hemp was legalized, Texas lawmakers were surprised when people started smoking it.

They banned smokables. Lawsuits ensued.

“It just got dealt with last year,” she said. “Now, I can grow for smokable products; As a consumer, I can possess smokable products; I can sell smokeable products as long as they're less than 0.3% Delta-9 THC on a dry weight basis. But I cannot ‘manufacture or process.’”

The nuance of the law has important implications for their business.

“It means I can't take flower and put it in a container,” she said. “I can't take a pre-roll and put a sticker on it. That is now illegal. So there's things like that where you're dealing with legislation changes. Then you're dealing with regulatory changes. And so that’s why we’re so involved.”

It’s not just about staying up to date. Part of their advocacy is about being a good-actor in the space, building trust with lawmakers, and pushing for new regulations where they currently fall short.

“The state has no age limits,” she said. “That’s been a huge concern.”

She and others have pushed for legislation to help protect minors, but so far, she says, the conversation is getting hung up on whether they should be able to sell hemp-derived THC at all, which some lawmakers view as outside the intention of the original law.

So for now, the work continues.

“I would hope that the state can see that these are adult-use products. Adults want them. We want them regulated like adult-use products,” she said.

“The fact that it's been in the market for this long should show some good faith to the state that there are good ways to manufacture these products, and there's absolutely bad ways to manufacture these products.

“And we want the bad manufacturers out.”

Last month, RESTART officially celebrated six years in business.

Shayda and Sydney have brought their third sister, Nika, in as co-owner in the brand, and the three of them just closed on the second location in Cedar Park, which they’re hoping to open in early 2025.

From those early home experiments, they’ve grown to a seven-figure business with a national DTC footprint, tens of thousands of followers across Instagram and Youtube, and dozens of SKUs, ranging from topicals, to edibles, to smokables, and more.

They’ve even found a path to expand beyond dispensaries with their THC-infused RTD drink, the RESTART RITA.

I love these things.

Not just cuz they’re tasty (they recently won Best of ATX from Austin Monthly), but also because they’re a real community effort – brewed right here in town by Austin Beer Works, packaged in cans from Canworks, and available everywhere from Tiny Grocer on South Congress, to Nixta Taqueria, and even the mini fridges at Hotel Van Zandt.

And of course, you can always find cold ones in the case at Shayda, Sydney, and Nika’s shop up on Burnet.