Ron Strider
Well-Known Member
It is a truth universally acknowledged that in 2017, a millennial with any access to money must be in want of experiences on which to spend it. For the pioneers of the cannabis "green rush," those venture capitalists and M.B.A. types who've sensed the rapidly shifting sensibility around consumption (which has gone from a maligned social scourge à la Reefer Madness to, for the creative class, something like what tobacco was in the '50s), the products in question also happen to be experiences. As legality spreads across the country, the resulting high for this young crop of businesses looks to be both lasting and seriously lucrative: The legal cannabis industry in North America was worth about $7 billion last year. That number is expected to grow anywhere between $24 billion and $44 billion by 2020.
Among these shiny new startups, there is something of a shared ethos, wherein it's less about seducing stoners, slackers, or any other equally tired stereotype than it is about dovetailing with an overwhelming cultural obsession with health and wellness. In a year where the hottest new adaptogen (for smoothies! for your skin! for your sex life!) is the minimally-psychoactive cannabis-derived CBD, and anything grown in the ground is seen as preferable to something created in a lab, cannabis is a cure-all, a chill-out, a Rihanna-approved way to handle the chronic cesspool of bad vibrations that is 2017. Plus, it's legal in some form in more than 25 states and the District of Columbia. (If you needed further proof of the death of cannabis' counterculture cache, Chuck Lorre has created a sitcom–with a laugh track–based in a cannabis dispensary in Southern California.) Unconvinced? Consider how unusual it once was for people to care about or insist upon fresh, organic, locally sourced food, and the current ubiquity of "farm to table." Now consider the amount of money that human beings will spend in order to feel different than they do naturally. In this sense, the future of cannabis may look a lot like that of alcohol, or haute cuisine: curated, thoughtful, consumer-driven–only without the hangover, or the weight gain. ("The munchies" are so '70s.)
Michael Ray's San Francisco—based company, Bloom Farms, aims to erase any remaining cannabis-related stigma through events like cannabis-fueled yoga classes and a pervading sense of social responsibility: The company covers the cost of one meal at a local food bank for every product that they sell. For Ray, who founded the company in 2014, "breaking down walls and showing people that the stigma of cannabis users being lazy and unproductive drags on society just isn't true" has become a personal mission, aided by the popularity of his company's best-selling vaporizer pen. The Bloom Farms "Highlighter" pen was inspired by what he saw as a "massive void" in the market. "The image most brands presented wasn't about health and wellness as much as it was about just getting really, really high," said Ray, who was looking for something that spoke to his own relationship with cannabis, "something that my mother would buy and not feel guilty integrating into her life." The result is sleek and subtle and sufficiently tech-savvy (it recharges in any USB port), and is available with a substantive, rose gold sheen that wouldn't look out of place peeking out of a Prada clutch.
When positioning his company, Canndescent, CEO Adrian Sedlin eschewed the tacky packaging and often-confusing nomenclature (terpenes, flavonoids, linalool, cannabinoids) that has saturated the market for years in favor of clear and concise branding cribbed from companies like Apple, Google, and LVMH. The pesticide- and microbial-free strains Canndescent grows, dries, and packages on site at his Desert Hot Springs—based headquarters (there's a plaque outside, commemorating the site as the state's first municipally permitted cultivator) are called Calm, Cruise, Create, Connect, and Charge, and are categorized as "answers to a question," Sedlin explained during a site visit earlier this year: "How do I want to feel?" Marketing is intentionally aspirational and vague: Toothsome models holding paintbrushes and coffee cups and surfboards and sun hats and each other under the trademarked tagline "The Art of Flower" could as easily be selling a fragrance or a personal hygiene product as they could the perfectly rolled joints shown in hand. Cannabis is a part of your lifestyle, says the messaging: Why not make it equally Instagram-friendly?
Canndescent's product is packed in glass jars alongside premium rolling papers and hemp wick matches, and packaged in keepsake-style orange boxes that wouldn't look out of place at a Whole Foods or Bergdorf Goodman. (That particular shade of orange isn't an accident, either: "Look, we want to be seen as the Hermès of cannabis," Sedlin said at one point during our interview. The numbers that designate different variations on a certain strain–Calm No. 102, for example, or Create No. 301–are a nod to Chanel's.) The fashion influence seems to be working: In the lead-up to Coachella, the company released over-the-shoulder "carryalls" (Canndescent boxes slung through with straps) to select dispensaries in Palm Springs, where they sat in glass cases among gilded stash boxes, cut crystal pipes, and Gucci-inspired bongs. They quickly sold out.
Peter Barsoom left a 19-year career in the financial industry in 2015 to found 1906, a "premium edible company" named for the year in which the U.S. government instated the Pure Food and Drug Act. The brand's chocolates deliver 5 milligrams of THC per truffle in elegant, childproof packaging that wouldn't be embarrassing to put out on a dining room table for guests. Barsoom hopes that the largest box (a dozen neatly arranged chocolates, for $44) will come to replace the traditional dinner party offering of a bottle of wine. "A big part of cannabis culture is sharing," says Barsoom, on a phone call from his "little Willy Wonka factory" in Colorado, where his company combines chocolate, THC, and CBD oils with mood- and energy-altering ingredients like corydalis, theanine, caffeine, and theobromine for blends with names like High Love, Go, Pause, and Midnight. "We consider ourselves first and foremost as an experiences company," says Barsoom, for whom cannabis has long been considered as the preferable, natural alternative to the substances that Americans traditionally employ to alter themselves physically, psychologically, and physiologically. "We are big believers in cannabis, and how much it can do in terms of helping people with sleep, with pain, energy, sensuality," he says. "It's an incredibly versatile plant medicine." Earlier this year, in a conversation with Forbes, Barsoom said: "Our competitors are Chardonnay, Xanax, and coffee, not other edibles."
The steady legalization movement has signified, to many, a sense of progress–for which the election of Donald J. Trump (a figure who has steadfastly and repeatedly opposed progress on many separate counts) did not bode well. Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been among the most vocal opponents to legalization, but over the long term, proponents argue, the world only spins one way: forward. "Legalization is really a grassroots voter initiative," Barsoom said. "I think the cat is out of the bag." In a recent interview with CNBC's The Profit, Sedlin voiced a similar lack of concern. "I mean, look, we pay our taxes. We're good corporate citizens. We conform to California law–every municipal law that we have," he said. "And guess what? I'm gonna be employing 280 people within 18 months." In other words, for those willing and able to dive right in to the modern-day gold rush, the future is looking green. "The reason why we're called 1906 is because we want to bookend this failed century [of prohibition]," Barsoom said. "Our tagline is it took more than a century for the world to return to its senses."
News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: For Premium Cannabis Companies Purveying Stylish, Socially Conscious Products, the Green Rush Is Real - Vogue
Author: Alessandra Codinha
Contact: Contact - Vogue
Photo Credit: Evan Thompson
Website: Vogue: Fashion, Beauty, Celebrity, Fashion Shows
Among these shiny new startups, there is something of a shared ethos, wherein it's less about seducing stoners, slackers, or any other equally tired stereotype than it is about dovetailing with an overwhelming cultural obsession with health and wellness. In a year where the hottest new adaptogen (for smoothies! for your skin! for your sex life!) is the minimally-psychoactive cannabis-derived CBD, and anything grown in the ground is seen as preferable to something created in a lab, cannabis is a cure-all, a chill-out, a Rihanna-approved way to handle the chronic cesspool of bad vibrations that is 2017. Plus, it's legal in some form in more than 25 states and the District of Columbia. (If you needed further proof of the death of cannabis' counterculture cache, Chuck Lorre has created a sitcom–with a laugh track–based in a cannabis dispensary in Southern California.) Unconvinced? Consider how unusual it once was for people to care about or insist upon fresh, organic, locally sourced food, and the current ubiquity of "farm to table." Now consider the amount of money that human beings will spend in order to feel different than they do naturally. In this sense, the future of cannabis may look a lot like that of alcohol, or haute cuisine: curated, thoughtful, consumer-driven–only without the hangover, or the weight gain. ("The munchies" are so '70s.)
Michael Ray's San Francisco—based company, Bloom Farms, aims to erase any remaining cannabis-related stigma through events like cannabis-fueled yoga classes and a pervading sense of social responsibility: The company covers the cost of one meal at a local food bank for every product that they sell. For Ray, who founded the company in 2014, "breaking down walls and showing people that the stigma of cannabis users being lazy and unproductive drags on society just isn't true" has become a personal mission, aided by the popularity of his company's best-selling vaporizer pen. The Bloom Farms "Highlighter" pen was inspired by what he saw as a "massive void" in the market. "The image most brands presented wasn't about health and wellness as much as it was about just getting really, really high," said Ray, who was looking for something that spoke to his own relationship with cannabis, "something that my mother would buy and not feel guilty integrating into her life." The result is sleek and subtle and sufficiently tech-savvy (it recharges in any USB port), and is available with a substantive, rose gold sheen that wouldn't look out of place peeking out of a Prada clutch.
When positioning his company, Canndescent, CEO Adrian Sedlin eschewed the tacky packaging and often-confusing nomenclature (terpenes, flavonoids, linalool, cannabinoids) that has saturated the market for years in favor of clear and concise branding cribbed from companies like Apple, Google, and LVMH. The pesticide- and microbial-free strains Canndescent grows, dries, and packages on site at his Desert Hot Springs—based headquarters (there's a plaque outside, commemorating the site as the state's first municipally permitted cultivator) are called Calm, Cruise, Create, Connect, and Charge, and are categorized as "answers to a question," Sedlin explained during a site visit earlier this year: "How do I want to feel?" Marketing is intentionally aspirational and vague: Toothsome models holding paintbrushes and coffee cups and surfboards and sun hats and each other under the trademarked tagline "The Art of Flower" could as easily be selling a fragrance or a personal hygiene product as they could the perfectly rolled joints shown in hand. Cannabis is a part of your lifestyle, says the messaging: Why not make it equally Instagram-friendly?
Canndescent's product is packed in glass jars alongside premium rolling papers and hemp wick matches, and packaged in keepsake-style orange boxes that wouldn't look out of place at a Whole Foods or Bergdorf Goodman. (That particular shade of orange isn't an accident, either: "Look, we want to be seen as the Hermès of cannabis," Sedlin said at one point during our interview. The numbers that designate different variations on a certain strain–Calm No. 102, for example, or Create No. 301–are a nod to Chanel's.) The fashion influence seems to be working: In the lead-up to Coachella, the company released over-the-shoulder "carryalls" (Canndescent boxes slung through with straps) to select dispensaries in Palm Springs, where they sat in glass cases among gilded stash boxes, cut crystal pipes, and Gucci-inspired bongs. They quickly sold out.
Peter Barsoom left a 19-year career in the financial industry in 2015 to found 1906, a "premium edible company" named for the year in which the U.S. government instated the Pure Food and Drug Act. The brand's chocolates deliver 5 milligrams of THC per truffle in elegant, childproof packaging that wouldn't be embarrassing to put out on a dining room table for guests. Barsoom hopes that the largest box (a dozen neatly arranged chocolates, for $44) will come to replace the traditional dinner party offering of a bottle of wine. "A big part of cannabis culture is sharing," says Barsoom, on a phone call from his "little Willy Wonka factory" in Colorado, where his company combines chocolate, THC, and CBD oils with mood- and energy-altering ingredients like corydalis, theanine, caffeine, and theobromine for blends with names like High Love, Go, Pause, and Midnight. "We consider ourselves first and foremost as an experiences company," says Barsoom, for whom cannabis has long been considered as the preferable, natural alternative to the substances that Americans traditionally employ to alter themselves physically, psychologically, and physiologically. "We are big believers in cannabis, and how much it can do in terms of helping people with sleep, with pain, energy, sensuality," he says. "It's an incredibly versatile plant medicine." Earlier this year, in a conversation with Forbes, Barsoom said: "Our competitors are Chardonnay, Xanax, and coffee, not other edibles."
The steady legalization movement has signified, to many, a sense of progress–for which the election of Donald J. Trump (a figure who has steadfastly and repeatedly opposed progress on many separate counts) did not bode well. Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has been among the most vocal opponents to legalization, but over the long term, proponents argue, the world only spins one way: forward. "Legalization is really a grassroots voter initiative," Barsoom said. "I think the cat is out of the bag." In a recent interview with CNBC's The Profit, Sedlin voiced a similar lack of concern. "I mean, look, we pay our taxes. We're good corporate citizens. We conform to California law–every municipal law that we have," he said. "And guess what? I'm gonna be employing 280 people within 18 months." In other words, for those willing and able to dive right in to the modern-day gold rush, the future is looking green. "The reason why we're called 1906 is because we want to bookend this failed century [of prohibition]," Barsoom said. "Our tagline is it took more than a century for the world to return to its senses."
News Moderator: Ron Strider 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: For Premium Cannabis Companies Purveying Stylish, Socially Conscious Products, the Green Rush Is Real - Vogue
Author: Alessandra Codinha
Contact: Contact - Vogue
Photo Credit: Evan Thompson
Website: Vogue: Fashion, Beauty, Celebrity, Fashion Shows