What's in a Name: The Story Behind PALO

Every so often, someone asks us the same question: what does PALO actually mean?

PA·LO — from the Latin palus, by way of Spanish, meaning stick. It's a simple word. That's exactly why we chose it.

How we got here

In 2017, after a sabbatical and a move to Miami Beach, we found a small plant-based brand that would become the foundation of what PALO is today. With the help of experts, we shaped it into a collection designed to support modern life in a natural, intuitive way — Elsa and Julian, with their son Nicolas.

When it came time to name it, we didn't want something invented. We wanted a word that pointed back to where all of it actually starts.

The power of plants

Palo is a tribute to something ancient: the belief that nature already holds the power to restore and heal. For thousands of years, healers relied on plants — their roots, their leaves, their sticks — to support the mind, body, and spirit. Long before "wellness" had a name, people were turning to what was already growing around them.

That belief hasn't gone anywhere. It's just been forgotten a little.

Nature found it first

Here's something worth remembering: a surprising amount of modern medicine is, at its root, borrowed from nature. Aspirin traces back to willow bark. Many of today's most trusted treatments started as a plant, a root, a compound someone noticed working long before a lab could explain why. Science didn't invent healing — it went looking for it, and found it, again and again, already growing in the ground.

That's the relationship we believe in: nature holds the answer, and science's job is to find it, refine it, and help us understand what healers already knew.

A name that means what we do

So when we needed a name, we didn't want something invented or decorative. We wanted a word that pointed back to where all of this actually comes from — the plant, the root, the stick in the ground. Palo does that. It's elemental. Unpretentious. It doesn't need to explain itself, the same way a root doesn't need to explain why it works.

We honor that tradition by creating formulas rooted in the same natural wisdom — plant-based, thoughtfully sourced, and reimagined for modern life. Ingredients like the Brazilian Green Bee Propolis in our throat spray carry that same throughline: a compound people have trusted for generations, long before it had a clinical name.

Wellness, made simple

That's the whole idea behind PALO, really. Not the loudest brand on the shelf, not the longest ingredient list. Just a return to what nature already figured out — found, understood, and shared with a little help from science.

Curious about the ingredients behind our formulas? Explore the full collection here.