Hey, bro! Heard of the seed bank Brothers Grimm Seeds? Many growers surely know the iconic Cinderella 99 and Apollo 13 strains, but few have thought about the unusual story behind their creation. At the center of this story is a nuclear engineer who became a legendary cannabis breeder: Rick Campanella, better known as MrSoul.
His journey is almost a Cinderella story, only in the cannabis world: from secret home experiments to worldwide fame, from being forced into the shadows to a triumphant return. Let’s follow this chronicle, full of unexpected turns, vivid details of the era, and human persistence.
Meet Rick “MrSoul” Campanella
Rick Campanella was born and raised in the US, and at first nothing suggested his future role in the cannabis industry. He studied nuclear engineering at a college in New York State, and that was when a secret hobby grow room appeared in his rented apartment. The young engineer memorized formulas by day and grew plants by night, studying everything on cultivation he could find. Robert Clarke’s “Marijuana Botany,” a true bible for growers at the time, had a particular influence on him. As he immersed himself deeper, Rick began both growing and dreaming of his own strains.
A turning point came with a letter Rick sent to the famous Dutch seed bank Super Sativa Seed Club (SSSC) in 1987. The young enthusiast discussed genetics and breeding with the Dutch, and a few weeks later received an offer he couldn’t refuse: become their American seed distributor. Imagine: still a student, he was already officially distributing elite Dutch seeds across the States! This gave him access to rare genetic lines and a vast body of knowledge, accelerating his development as a breeder. Gradually, the hobby became a full-fledged business: harvests grew, along with the reputation of the mysterious grower hiding behind the name MrSoul.
The Overgrow forum and the birth of the Brothers Grimm
In the mid-’90s, the internet brought cannabis enthusiasts scattered around the world together on the legendary Overgrow forum. Under the alias MrSoul, Rick actively shared his successes and discoveries there. His energetic style and willingness to reveal growing secrets quickly made him a prominent figure in the online community. It was on Overgrow that fate brought MrSoul together with like-minded people who played a huge role in his life.
He met another passionate breeder known as Sly, and they quickly connected over their love of genetics and experiments. The paths of future industry stars also crossed on the forum, including Subcool, the future founder of TGA Seeds, and Duke Diamond, with whom MrSoul exchanged experience and ideas.
Riding this wave of enthusiasm, Soul and Sly decided to take a bold step: establish their own seed bank to give the world their exclusive strains. That’s how Brothers Grimm Seeds appeared in 1996, the cannabis world’s “Brothers Grimm,” named after the storytellers for a reason. A truly fairy-tale story of creating new strains lay ahead. With support from Canadian reseller Heaven’s Stairway, their seeds quickly reached home growers around the world.
The Brothers Grimm gained fame as suppliers of incredibly stable, productive genetics. Their plants had short flowering periods, abundant resin, and exotic terpene profiles. Stability was the main principle: no hermaphroditism, only carefully selected lines tested under different stresses. In an era when Feminized seeds are produced to give female plants. feminized seeds ↗ were only gaining popularity, and many had problems with “herms,” that reputation was worth its weight in gold.
The Amsterdam spark: how Cinderella appeared
Every legend has a starting point. For Brothers Grimm, it was a chance discovery Rick made on a trip to Amsterdam. In 1997, or 1996 according to other accounts, MrSoul traveled through the Netherlands looking for new seeds and stopped at Sensi Smile, a coffeeshop belonging to the famous Sensi Seeds seed bank.
After buying some Jack Herer buds there, he was surprised to find several seeds in one of them. He didn’t have high hopes, but once home, he decided to germinate them out of curiosity. He made the right call: one seed grew into a female with remarkable qualities, which he affectionately named Princess.
Princess immediately caused a sensation in Rick’s home grow room. It was a compact plant, ideally suited to indoor growing.
Princess’s buds gave off a vivid ripe pineapple aroma, matured surprisingly quickly, in around 7 weeks of flowering, and developed an abundant resin coating. The plant behaved almost perfectly: not a hint of hermaphroditism over years of cloning, and resilience under different growing conditions. “It was the Holy Grail of indoor growing,” MrSoul later recalled of his discovery.
Of course, preserving genes like that is every breeder’s dream. Rick set out to turn Princess into a full-fledged seed strain without losing her magical qualities.
He used the classic technique of cubing clones, which involves repeated A backcross: crossing a descendant with one of its parents to preserve or reinforce that parent's traits. backcrosses ↗ to the maternal line to increase the proportion of her genes in each generation. First, MrSoul pollinated Princess with pollen from a selected Shiva Skunk male, producing the P.50 generation, 50% Princess. He crossed the best males from these seeds back to the original Princess, obtaining P.75, 75% maternal genes, then repeated the process through P.88 and P.94. Finally, seeds of the ~P.97 generation crossed with the original Princess yielded a stable line that could be sown. That was the birth of Cinderella 99, a.k.a. “Cinderella 99.”
The story itself also inspired the new strain’s name. From an unremarkable seed found in an ordinary purchase, Rick’s persistence produced a real princess, just like the heroine of the famous Cinderella fairy tale, rising from the ashes to the royal ball.
MrSoul decided to play on that analogy, naming his masterpiece Cinderella, because the humble discovery’s journey to “royal” heights was obvious. Incidentally, Cinderella 99 fully lived up to her name: according to Rick, plants grown from her seeds were “like two peas in a pod” with Princess herself, and even exceeded her yield by 25%.
Beyond Cinderella 99, in those golden years the Brothers Grimm gave the world other masterpieces. Another seed from that same Amsterdam stash grew into a mother named Genius. According to legend, she was Princess’s “sister,” with special properties. Genius became a key part of creating the Apollo line, particularly the famous Apollo 13 hybrid, named after the space odyssey in which a bold experiment nearly became a catastrophe but ended in triumph. Apollo 13 resulted from crossing Genius with one of Princess’s lines and also entered the pantheon of iconic strains.
There was also Café Girl, the third successful female from those Amsterdam seeds, which became the mother of Rosetta Stone, a hybrid based on Jack Herer and White Widow. All these names, Princess, Genius, and Café Girl, were essentially chance gifts from fate, found in a bag of Jack Herer. But it was MrSoul’s insight and experience that turned them into stable seed lines growers around the world still admire.
It’s worth mentioning that Brothers Grimm’s fame spread beyond a narrow circle of forum members. By the late ‘90s, respected publications were talking about Cinderella and Apollo. High Times, cannabis culture’s main magazine, included Cinderella 99 and Apollo 13 in its Top 10 strains of all time, recognizing them among growers’ most beloved and sought-after strains.
The Brothers Grimm’s genetics spread quickly around the world, and other breeders began using them to create new hybrids, many of which later won cup awards. MrSoul’s name became a symbol of quality home breeding. Who could have imagined that behind it was a humble engineer who, just a few years earlier, had secretly grown cannabis in his apartment!
Dangerous times: into the shadows (2002)
But the fairy tale couldn’t last forever, at least in an era when cannabis remained illegal. By the early 2000s, Brothers Grimm Seeds had been thriving for 6 years, but growing fame had a downside: increased attention from unwanted eyes.
In 2002, MrSoul and Sly suddenly announced that the seed bank was closing. The official reason was security concerns. Rumors circulated about impending prosecution of underground producers: during those years, risks and law enforcement attention around major online platforms were growing, so MrSoul decided to lie low. The environment was getting too “hot,” and Rick made the difficult decision to lie low.
It was a dramatic turn: a company at the height of its success effectively dissolved itself to save its creators from possible prison sentences.
He tried moving the business to Europe, relocating to Belgium in 2002, hoping to find refuge and start over, but in 2 years he never managed to establish a new base. Ultimately, MrSoul had to return to the US and completely leave his beloved craft for a time.
For the next decade, Rick lived like an ordinary person. He took another engineering job. Somewhere deep inside, hope of returning to breeding surely remained, but outwardly he seemed resigned. Meanwhile, the cannabis industry wasn’t standing still: although federal prohibition remained in the US, individual states began moving toward legalization. Rick watched from the sidelines, wondering whether a chance would come to return to the scene legally.
The legend returns: Colorado calls
After a long 13 years, that chance finally came. In 2014, Colorado fully legalized recreational marijuana, opening an era of a legal US market. For MrSoul, it was a sign from fate. In 2015, sensing change in the air, Rick packed his bags and headed for the wild west of the cannabis business, Colorado, with the clear intention of reviving his “Brothers Grimm.”
Old connections came to his aid. By then, breeder Duke Diamond, whom Rick knew from the forums, had grown stronger and gained recognition. Duke, a big fan of Brothers Grimm genetics, eagerly agreed to become a partner in relaunching the legendary seed bank. Together, they founded a new legal venture, registered the company in Colorado, and began reviving what had been carefully hidden all those years. Though the original mother plants were gone, MrSoul had preserved a whole treasure trove of seeds and knowledge. There were enough genes to recreate the beloved Cinderella 99, Apollo, and other strains in a new century.
Recreating the old legends wasn’t easy. Rick germinated old seeds again, selecting The observable traits of a plant, such as its height, leaf shape or colour. phenotypes ↗ close to the lost Princess and restoring the lines piece by piece. Rosetta Stone, for example, had to be remade: as MrSoul explained, the original parents, Café Girl and White Widow, were lost back in 2001, so modern Rosetta is Jack Herer × P75, a Princess-derived line, and the feminized version is Jack Herer × reversed Cinderella 99. Other projects were painstakingly restored in similar ways. But Rick’s experience and wisdom hadn’t gone anywhere: his ability to “cube” clones, stabilize phenotypes, and avoid hermaphrodites proved useful once again.
Brothers Grimm Seeds got a second wind, officially this time. The company’s home is now Johnstown, Colorado, where it established its own indoor facility, essentially a legal version of MrSoul’s old grow rooms, only equipped with the latest technology. After contributing to the relaunch, Duke Diamond eventually decided to branch off and develop his own projects, later creating Dominion Seed Co. MrSoul stayed at the helm of his own creation, bringing in a new team and his family.
A family business: MrsSoul and the Brothers Grimm team
In this new chapter, Rick was joined by people who helped take Brothers Grimm Seeds to an even higher level. His main ally became his wife, Laura Campanella, now known in the industry as MrsSoul. Laura is more than a life partner: she’s also an experienced cultivator and breeder who shares Rick’s passion for plants. Before moving to Colorado, she had made a name for herself by founding Cannabis Oklahoma Magazine and actively promoting legalization and support for small producers.
Taking the helm of the revived “Brothers Grimm,” MrsSoul got to work with heart and energy. At first, she handled test germinations of new seed batches, monitored production cycles, and personally participated in developing new hybrids. Her contribution was so tangible that Rick entrusted operational management to his wife: Laura became the company’s COO, chief operating officer, and in 2023 effectively took on the president’s responsibilities.
Marc “Marc Eden” Emmelmann also helps the Campanella family in the business, serving as Brothers Grimm’s vice president. Marc is responsible for brand development, marketing, and public relations. It was through Marc Eden’s efforts that the longstanding seed bank’s name became prominent again at festivals and on social media, without excessive grandiosity, focusing instead on history, quality, and respect for the growing community.
The industry changed considerably during the forced break. Whereas Brothers Grimm had previously focused on classic Regular seeds can produce both male and female plants. regular seeds ↗, in 2016 MrSoul began actively working with feminized seeds, trying to apply his high standards to them. Cinderella 99 Fem (XX), Rosetta Stone XX, and other all-female lines appeared. Rick had long avoided feminized seeds for fear of unpredictability, but new technologies allowed him to achieve nearly 100% stability and no “herms.” Brothers Grimm is now also known for its female seed stock, and MrSoul himself admits he’s very excited about progress in this direction.
In 2018, the US passed the so-called Farm Bill, which legalized industrial hemp and generally softened the federal attitude toward cannabis. This opened even more opportunities for companies like Brothers Grimm. Rick and his family finally came out of the shadows: their Colorado “seed farm” began thriving, offering seeds directly to home growers. The brand even launched Breeder Direct, a direct breeder sales program. By 2025, Brothers Grimm Seeds was more than a legend of the past: it was a modern boutique seed bank that remains independent, faithful to its traditions, and unafraid to experiment.
Significantly, in 2025 Laura Campanella officially became CEO of Brothers Grimm Seeds, the first woman to lead the company in its history. MrSoul hasn’t left at all: he continues his beloved work as Breeding Director, passing his experience to a new generation of growers. “Laura brings heart, talent, and incredible hard work to the company,” Rick said about his wife. “She’s not just the best candidate; she’s the only person who can carry this legacy forward.” This family partnership has proven brilliant: MrsSoul manages the processes and vision, MrSoul creates new genetics, and a team of dedicated colleagues stands beside them.
“Long live the home grower!”
The story of Rick “MrSoul” Campanella and Brothers Grimm Seeds is a living chronicle of cannabis culture over the last three decades. It reflects an entire era: from enthusiasts’ illegal experiments in the ’80s, through the flourishing internet forums of the ’90s, to the dangers of the 2000s and, finally, revival in the legalization era. Rick went from a romantic engineer to a breeding elder whose strains are forever written into the cannabis bible.
Throughout it all, he stayed true to himself and his principle: serving home growers. No wonder the renewed Brothers Grimm team’s motto is “Long live the home grower!” It was for those gardening enthusiasts that MrSoul once risked everything, and for them that he returned when the time allowed.
He no longer needs to hide. On the contrary, he happily talks to fans at exhibitions, gives interviews, and shares experience.
The Brothers Grimm Seeds story continues, full of new chapters and characters, but its spirit remains unchanged: family, friendship, creativity, and the freedom to grow a beloved plant. Like a good fairy tale, it had trials, miraculous rescues, and its own happy ending, which, however, is only the beginning of new adventures.
Sources: publicly available publications about the company and the strain.
