With its warm, and hip suburbanite designs, Goodships edibles could easily sit amongst the mints and mineral water at Starbucks. That’s likely because Seattle-based creator Jody Hall is a former Starbucks corporate marketer who also started a gourmet cupcake chain called Cupcake Royale.
Designed to look like something you’d find at the checkout counter at Whole Foods, the vaginal suppositories and lubricating pleasure spray are wrapped in minimalist, feminine packaging (a metal tin or an unassuming brown bottle) that says organic approachability and homeopathic health care.
These pre-rolled joints come in packs of five, tucked inside a cardboard box that borrows heavily from Tarot card imagery—the front reads “Past. Present. Future.,” and features a fortune teller reading a crystal ball. Each pack includes one pure gold leaf joint in a slender glass vial.
Decidedly female and unabashedly high-end, their rose gold vape pens look right at home inside any designer purse. Tattoo artist Scott Campbell named this months-old company for his grandmother, who baked pot brownies for Scott’s cancer-stricken mother.
And so we've laid out this little trip for you to take, visual evidence of pot's maturation, perfectly dosed out. What you see here are products that have risen to the burgeoning industry's design challenges and helped usher in the renaissance of pot packaging. So put your rose gold lighters up and enjoy the high.
Assaf attributes this to the industry's strong feminine influence on the executive front. Close to a third of execs are women, thanks, in part, to the relative youth of the business and the subsequent lack of barriers. That’s why hmblt’s pen looks right at home nestled amongst a tube of mascara in your purse, and why Beboe’s cannibis-infused pastilles look like they were made by Hermes.
Women cannabis users outnumber men by 9%, according to the 2017 Cannabis Consumers Coalition. A sizeable chunk of that business has nothing to do with getting blazed, but treats menstrual cramps, migraines, anxiety, and indigestion. Floria’s vaginal suppositories, meant to ease menstrual cramping, don’t exactly scream “rager." And so, pot’s sales pitch has softened, going for not just healthy, but high end.
The new pot packaging fosters accessibility, refinement, and dare we say, responsibility. Whether companies are selling traditional flower, inhalable vapor, edible sweets, or topical rubs, the packaging is warm and inviting, even healthy. And it’s feminine. “Past products were packaged in a very utilitarian way, almost shoving in your face that this was a marijuana product,” says Jessica Assaf, founder of Cannabis Feminist, a community of pot-positive women. “It was very masculine.”
Today’s marijuana consumer base includes hipsters, geriatrics, executives, athletes, and working moms. Companies have had to adapt to this shift—stepping up their branding to avoid getting tossed out like yesterday’s bong water. Unless a business is content with selling Sour Diesel out of a lucite box, they’re looking to distance themselves from the dank cloud of marijuana’s visual past.
Three years and many billions of dollars in annual revenue later, the legal cannabis business has grown up fast—like an awkward teen who fills out and shoots up over the summer—showcasing maturing products lines, chic delivery methods, and packaging that’s taken cues from Silicon Valley and the ateliers of Paris. Six years ago, cannabis was a roughly $1.5 million business, appealing to the guy overthinking his value meal order on line at McDonald’s. According to Forbes, it’s now on track to become a $20.2 billion industry by 2021, with a dot.com boom-level growth of 25% year over year. It hasn’t just grown in dollar signs, it’s matured—eschewing the Dazed and Confused vibes for sophistication and radical inclusivity.
"
one of legal pot’s early packagers. “We were trying to adapt that for the cannabis industry.” In 2014, Hester was asked by California company Bloom Farms to design packaging for their vaporizers and pre-rolled joints. He used elegant cardboard boxes with gold foil accents, making sure to include a single match to ignite by way of the cardboard box. Bloom Farms CEO Michael Ray urged Hester to differentiate from the market’s “stoner culture—Rastafarian colors, big pot leafs and such.” Hester says he wanted packaging that was “straightforward, clearly labeled, and approachable.”
Y
ou know when you buy an expensive bottle of whiskey and it comes in that really elaborate cardboard box?” asks Pavement Design creative director Michael Hester,
EDIBLES
TOPICAL
FLOWER
VAPES
Design by: Lydia Ding
Words by: Alyssa Mercante
How the Cannabis Industry’s Branding Has Matured Before Our Eyes
GLOW UP
LEGAL POT'S
Women own over a quarter of legal cannabis businesses in the United States.
