MSNL started in 1999 as a mail-order seed business in the Netherlands, three years before it had a website. The site followed in 2002, and in 2005 the head office moved to London, which is still where the company is based.
The catalogue grew by partnership as much as by breeding. An arrangement with Auto Seeds in 2010 brought autoflowering varieties in, and the company also lists KC Brains and Bomb Seeds among the breeders it works with. It claims to have sold over a million seeds and points at more than 940 documented grow diaries using its genetics.
It sells the same catalogue through three storefronts rather than one international shop: the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, each in its own currency and dispatched locally. The products are identical across all three. The American one opened with a New York office in 2022 and moved to the msnlseeds.com domain in 2025.