I’m probably the only chief executive in the country, possibly the world, who will offer to let you smoke out of one of the awards that decorate his retail space.
When people visit, their gaze inevitably takes in the object that sits in a glass enclosure in our downtown Denver location. The glass trophy is about a foot tall, with a depression on the top and two glass necks extending from the central chamber. It’s a beautiful piece of handmade glassware. The words etched into the side read: Colorado Cup, Best Sativa 2012. It will always be special to me for two reasons: It’s the first award our company ever won. And it’s a working bong.
How we won it—and how we started racking up awards for our cannabis products—is really a story about feedback.
All companies crave feedback. Most often it comes from customers. And some of those moments can be poignant as well. I know of one customer, an elderly woman in her seventies, who comes into our shop all the time to buy marijuana to help her with the pain she suffers from a debilitating muscular disease. She is always accompanied by her husband, who is a nonsmoker. But the two of them have become fixtures at our downtown location on Denver’s Santa Fe Drive. When I was visiting recently, the woman made a point of coming over to me and telling me how well she was being treated by one of our budtenders, Jen.
At first glance, you would not think the two women had much in common. One’s an elderly woman who moves with difficulty. The other is a hip, healthy young woman covered with tattoos and piercings. But they have found common ground in their passion for marijuana. What started as a simple transaction has blossomed into a weekly ritual.
That’s a beautiful kind of feedback that every business owner needs to hear and see. It reaffirms that you’re creating a business—a culture and an environment—where all kinds of people feel welcome.
But if we’re honest, entrepreneurs have to admit that we also crave feedback from our peers. We want people in our own industries to nod and say we’ve done a great job.
The marijuana industry may have been new in the United States, but now that it was out of the closet in a few states, it was losing no time organizing competitions. Our grow program had blossomed under Corey’s leadership. Our harvests were back on track. Our confidence was growing. It was only inevitable that we would start to think about entering some of these new cannabis contests. Rooster Magazine, Colorado’s edgiest arts monthly, was sponsoring something it called the Colorado Cup. There was no fancy exhibition attached to the competition. There would be no award ceremony. No partylike atmosphere in one of the state’s convention centers. All we had to do was submit our entries—the best of our best weed—and wait to be notified.
Rather than a small group of us conducting a selection process at the office, we hit upon the idea of throwing a private strain selection party off the premises. That way, all our card-carrying guests would feel free to smoke in a relaxed setting, get high, and identify the strains they thought we should enter. It sounded like a great idea for a party. Naturally, we made sure to hire caterers who brought plenty of food.
You wouldn’t believe the debates people would get into over marijuana. It’s not enough when you’re doing a selection to say, “Well, this weed got me high, so I’m giving it a thumbs-up!”
It’s a little more complicated than that. I’ll go back to the beer analogy I used earlier. Say you’re the owner of a local microbrewery who does a great business in your neck of the woods selling IPA—India pale ale—to your customers. You’re so proud of your beer that you decide to enter it in one of the million beer competitions that occur every year in the United States. You do okay, but you don’t win. In fact, afterward, someone close to the judges pulls you over to give you some pointers. “Yours is a great beer,” the guy says, “but it’s not totally representative of an IPA.”
This observation—close but no cigar—is probably heard wherever aficionados gather to judge the merits of whatever their passions are: beer, wine, chocolates, mustards, classic cars, and on and on. I’ll bet right now there’s someone who just lost a dog show who is hearing a similar thing: “Your schnauzer was wonderful, Mrs. Jones. She just wasn’t the quintessential schnauzer. The ideal schnauzer. She didn’t hit the benchmark all schnauzers must hit to be considered perfect.” There are subtle variations that creep into any product—or breed—that differentiate it from the standard. You might enjoy and celebrate those differences locally, but when it comes time to enter a competition, you have to nail the standard.
So the night of that selection party, as the haze grew and perfumed every corner of my house, people were debating the merits of our weed on this level. This is an awesome Super Lemon Haze, they were saying, but is it so typical of the Super Lemon Haze strain that the judges will love it? Did it have that taste of a smoky lemon meringue pie when you smoked it? Did those buds have that clean scent of lemon peel when you sniffed it in your hand? Because if not, let’s pick a different strain.
And they’d pass around containers of different strains and smoke small samples of each from a little glass pipe or a bong. Round and round we’d go. Those of us who weren’t blasted out of our minds or absolutely giddy took some notes on the process. Come morning, we had our guests’ written comments on every strain, and we made some decisions in the light of day. We filled out our application, assembled our samples, and dropped everything off at the location the magazine sponsoring the contest had designated.
And we promptly forgot about it.
We had a business to run. We couldn’t waste time waiting by the phone.
Corey and I had become friends since he’d started working for us. I enjoyed hanging out with him and his family. Since there was no space to meet at the grow facilities, he and I had grown accustomed to hitting a local bar, El Diablo, where we’d hash out our plans over shots of chilled Patrón tequila and Dos Equis beer.
On one such afternoon I said, “Hey, what’s the deal with the Colorado Cup? Shouldn’t we have heard by now?”
We called the magazine the next day and got hold of the guy who had launched the contest. I could imagine what a great time the judges of this particular competition must have had working their way through the glorious abundance of weed that had poured into their office from every grower in the state. Their judging process had to have been ten thousand times more fragrant and hysterical than the selection party at my house.
The guy sounded like he was still coming down from that high.
“Oh, yeah!” he said. “I was gonna call you guys! You won!”
Actually, we won not one but three awards. Our Super Lemon Haze had come in third place for best sativa. Our Hells Angels OG Kush had come in third for best indica. The stunner: Our Jack Herer had taken first place for best sativa in the state.
The next day the magazine dropped off the glass trophy/bong at our downtown store. It had been hand-blown by an artisanal glass business, Kind Creations, in Fort Collins.
All of us were ecstatic. Holy shit, I thought, three years of this crazy business and it’s finally paying off. The money was good. We were hitting our numbers, the company was operating smoothly, and we were getting great feedback from our customers. But this was something different. Outside recognition was hugely gratifying.
We were on the map!
Granted, the map extended only to the borders of our very square state, but we were on it just the same.
When the magazine issue touting our victory appeared, the publisher dropped off plenty of copies to share with employees and customers.
And then just a few days later, a couple of angry Hells Angels members walked into our downtown Denver dispensary.
Since it’s probably been a while since you rode with a motorcycle crew, let me fill you in. Shortly after our budtenders opened shop that morning, in walked two burly biker dudes in “cuts”—black leather vests emblazoned with patches signifying their membership. On the other side of the glass door, my employees could see yet another biker waiting outside, his arms crossed as if blocking the door. As I’ve mentioned, you can’t enter a medical marijuana dispensary unless you’re a card-carrying patient. So I suppose I should be grateful that these two fellows were following the law.
The two men flashed their red medical marijuana cards and held up the magazine article I just mentioned. “It says in here that you guys sell the Hells Angels OG Kush. Is that right?”
“Uh . . . yeah?”
“Can we see it?”
My clerk, after checking them into our system, led them down the bar to a jar and showed them the buds.
There’s a lot of marijuana history in that name. The strain is said to have been originally bred by Hells Angels members themselves. It became legendary, with wonderful scent of cotton candy and pine. We grew this bud in 2013, and it tested at more than 33 percent THC—higher amounts of THC than any bud entered in competition, ever. As my budtenders tell our customers, it comes on like a freight train. It’ll pretty much erase anything you’re feeling—from stress to excruciating pain. The OG in the name has a mysterious origin. Some insist it refers to a now-defunct, Canadian-based marijuana website—Overgrown.com—and honors those pioneers who traded seeds and kept great strains alive, albeit illegally, until the Canadian government shut them down under pressure from the United States. Still others say that OG stands for “Original Gangster,” in honor of an early strain that was big in Southern California, or for “Ocean Grown,” because it was bred near the California coast. Either way, OG has come to signify a classic strain. And Kush refers to a major mountain chain that bridges India and Pakistan, where marijuana is thought to have originated.
The leaves of the OG Kush have a very distinctive “frosted” look, almost as if the leaf has sprouted a furry coat. If you look closely, you can see that the tiny hairs that give the bud that look actually secrete sticky resins. These structures are called trichomes. Dried buds will also have flecks of tan, light green, and dark green, which, combined with that piney resin smell, can pretty much persuade you that you’re looking at the real Hells Angels OG Kush.
“Okay,” one of the bikers said. “That’s it, all right. We’re putting you on notice right now that you need to immediately cease and desist from using our name or logo in any capacity. It is protected by copyright. If you fail to comply, you will receive a letter from our attorney. We will file a suit to protect our trademark.”
One of my employees gave me a call.
“Wait,” I said. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. The Hells Angels are threatening us with a trademark violation suit?”
“They say we can still sell it, but we can’t use their name!”
It was the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of. The sort of exchange you’d expect to see in a comedy sketch on the TV show Portlandia.
I had read that the Angels had started cracking down on people and businesses that used their name and logo. I don’t blame them. There are too many people in this world who glom onto any design or product to project to the world that they are cool. The Hells Angels mark was one of the most abused, in that respect. When we started growing and selling that particular indica, I thought we were honoring its history in the cannabis community by continuing to label it under its original name.
But okay. We had received their special brand of feedback, and we were ready to acquiesce to their request. From that moment forward, the product took on a new name: Hells OG Kush. It’s still there in our dispensaries. Just don’t ask for it by the old moniker. You don’t want to piss those guys off.
I was sitting in a business meeting in the middle of the day, smoking some weed, taking notes, and loving my life.
In my old life, business meetings were a necessary evil. I had several a day. They appeared on my calendar, and I marched through them like an automaton, trying to cover as much ground as possible. Meet some new people. Make some decisions. Close some deals. Inevitably I’d get stuck in a dog of a meeting where whoever was running the show wasn’t keeping his charges on task. The meetings dragged on. My eyes glazed over. I was bored out of my mind.
In my new life, meetings were joyful events. Corey would sometimes show up with some fantastic new product. As with any business, a new product means a host of new decisions. How does this fit into our line? Does it have any special features we ought to call out in our marketing? How did it do in the grow? Was it an eight-week strain, or longer or shorter than that benchmark? Did we get 1 pound per light in the grow room, more or less? What are we telling our customers about it? How will it help the medical customers? And the biggest question of all: What’s it like to smoke?
There was only one way to know.
I’ve always had a high tolerance for THC. I can smoke plenty of weed without becoming debilitated. When I was still in my twenties and starting my first ice cream business, I’d smoke in the back room to get ready for the day or when we were closing up at night. When I was running my real estate company, I’d smoke on my time—never in the office, never around clients or others I imagined wouldn’t approve.
But all that’s changed in my new life. At one point I have even participated in lengthy testing meetings where I’ve done about forty or fifty hits of various strains, then gone straight into an afternoon conference call without noticeable impairment.
This is actually consistent with the science on marijuana. Studies do show that people react differently to marijuana and that people do build up a tolerance to the drug over time with frequent use. In some studies, however, the tolerance has been shown to be nonuniform.
That means that while one hit of a joint no longer gives longtime users the same high and their cognitive function remains unimpaired, the bud will still impact them physically. They don’t get as high, but the product still eradicates their aches and pains. In general, this tends to be good news for a lot of our medical patients. They don’t need to smoke more to feel better physically.
Perhaps my tolerance has something to do with my size or my general metabolism, but it’s always been that way, even when I was an adolescent. My brother and his friends would be stoned on one or two hits, but I’d need ten to reach that point. Once, when I got into the business, I happened to share a joint with a friend. One puff affected him so strongly that I needed to stub out the joint and take him out for lunch and a beer—anything to process that THC out of his system.
Only a few of my employees allow themselves to smoke when we’re in these meetings. They know that they’re better off getting high on their own time. As fun a place as ours is to work, it’s still work. They don’t want to be laughing giddily when we need them to think cogently. A few hits will throw them off their game for the rest of the meeting, or even the afternoon. So most don’t indulge.
But those of us with a high tolerance—me, Corey, and Barb—will light up, smoke, and discuss the finer points of the product.
So this is Grape Cola. Cool.
I see the purple color and I’m getting the astringent smell I’d expect from the bud. Nice.
It tastes good and the effect is nicely indica, but not too overbearing.
Oh, this is Sour Diesel.
Yeah—but the diesel smell is off. It won’t sell.
People will call bullshit if we try to pass this off as Sour D, even though the provenance and taste are there. Without that smell it won’t sell.
We were excited. The Cannabis Cup was coming to Denver for the second time in history. High Times, the same magazine I’d read as a kid when I was first initiated into the mysteries of cannabis, has sponsored a legendary Amsterdam event each November for the past thirty years. In 2010, High Times began running events in the U.S. states where marijuana was legal. As I write this, the magazine now runs six events worldwide every year—in Seattle; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Denver; Clio, Michigan; and Amsterdam, of course.
It was time for another strain selection party. We were going for the big one.
The number 420 holds a special significance for marijuana enthusiasts. The trouble is, no one has bothered to record precisely why the number is special. I’ve heard various theories. One legend says it’s the time—4:20 p.m.—when a group of weed-smoking teenagers would gather outside their high school in San Rafael, California, in the 1970s to light up. Others say that the 420 tradition originated in a 1939 short story by the science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, in which an explorer to the planet Venus falls under the influence of a mysterious, hallucinogenic “mirage-plant” that sounds a lot like marijuana. When the explorer’s reverie ceases, the man looks at his watch and is “astonished to find the time was only 4:20.”
Regardless of the origin, this number has inspired millions of people worldwide to designate April 20 as the day marijuana smokers raise a silent joint in honor of their blessed herb.
Well, on that day in April 2012, Denver’s EXDO Center, a city block with outdoor space connecting four separate buildings, was packed to the gills with thirty thousand people. A sell-out crowd. For three days I had been hawking our wares out of a booth.
The Cannabis Cup looked like every trade show you’ve ever attended—with one exception. Everything you saw was devoted to the glory of marijuana.
You know those trade shows where people give you key chains and candy and other useless trinkets? Imagine instead walking down the aisle and being invited to take a hit from a bong or vaporizer.
You can’t pull off a show like this easily. For one thing, since transporting marijuana across state lines is still a violation of federal law, the state of Colorado had officials on site to check that every ounce of marijuana was sourced from a Colorado grower. In that respect, it was a little like a dog or antiques show. Every ounce had its own papers, its own provenance.
You had to be eighteen to get in the doors and have a valid red card to be able to enter the designated “medicating”—that is, smoking area, which you could easily spot as soon as you entered. It was where everyone was headed: the building in the EXDO Center that was filled with a thick, resinous cloud. Our booth was located there.
I had taken our precious Colorado Cup off the shelf and transported it to a place of honor in the center of our booth. It was bolted down to the table with a high-tech cable, and our staffers took turns lighting it all weekend long.
People were loving it.
Every day I was on my feet for eight hours, passing out brochures, selling our Green Man T-shirts, and inviting people to try out our products.
I was baked off my ass.
Seriously, I’ve never been so high in my entire life. At one point I thought I was hallucinating.
Forget what I just said about my legendary tolerance. Tolerance meets its match in a 20,000-square-foot hall packed with a steady stream of people and clouds of marijuana smoke. People came in, took their hits, exhaled, then walked out of our booth, only to be replaced by others who did exactly the same thing. Eventually the cloud of smoke inside this large exhibit hall was dense. Simply breathing in this space was like taking a little hit with every breath.
My head was swimming. It was actually stimulating to be in the presence of so many people who no longer had to hide the fact that they enjoyed marijuana.
The other buildings and the outdoor area of the EXDO Center were smoke-free. There the show featured a good number of educational sessions throughout the weekend. People were learning how to set up their own grows. Fitness instructors we giving classes on how to exercise and manage pain with marijuana. Activist attorneys were lecturing on various aspects of the legalization movement. There were panel discussions on how our society would be changed by the presence of legal marijuana.
Most people were there to smoke and shop and enjoy the music. To take it all in, to be part of this moment of change. Images of the marijuana leaf were everywhere. The rediscovery of marijuana in modern America owes a lot to young hippies who embraced the drug in the 1960s. Remarkably, much of what I was seeing that weekend was merely an extension of the old 1960s imagery.
It made me wonder: If marijuana was going to grow beyond the demographic of enthusiasts, would it need to adopt a new imagery or look?
I wanted our business to grow. Everyone was talking about the possibility that marijuana would one day be legal for all adults in the state of Colorado, not just those with medical conditions. If adult recreational use was approved, we’d see a new clientele in our dispensaries. People who had always been curious about smoking marijuana but were not willing to break the law to try it. People who had sneaked a smoke as adolescents but who never smoked it again as adults.
If you wanted those people to feel comfortable giving you their business, was the tie-dyed aesthetic of the 1960s still the way to go? Or did we need a new aesthetic?
I knew I was on to something, but I was too busy to give it more than a fleeting thought. But that show was what got me thinking about the ways in which branding permeates our lives.
I’d venture to say that anyone in the world who sees a distinctive red-and-white swirl on any product will immediately think “Coca-Cola,” even though those words or their abbreviation, “Coke,” is nowhere to be found on the object. Show anyone a swoosh design on sporting apparel and they will immediately know the brand even if the critical four letters—N-I-K-E—are not present. The same goes for that little transparent apple with the bite taken out of it; millions know what that symbol stands for.
Admittedly, I’ve chosen three of the world’s biggest brands. But lesser brands are still highly recognizable by their logos, and that recognizability can have an enormous impact on those brands’ fortunes. Chances are good, for example, that you have at some point in your life seen someone wearing a T-shirt or sweatshirt with the image of a black dog on it. Those shirts are the brand of the Black Dog Tavern, which opened in 1971 on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Today the brand has grown to include numerous gift shops and general stores. When you see someone wearing one of those shirts, your recognition of that brand is reinforced. Should your travels take you to Massachusetts, you’re likely to make a point of visiting one of the company’s locations—if only to see what all the fuss is about.
Our industry was still small, so small that a Black Dog, a Sam Adams, an Apple, or a Starbucks had yet to emerge. But in time, one certainly would.
For now, our T-shirts featured the face of the Green Man—a spirit of nature from ancient pagan lore. High as I was, as I stood there in the hall watching cannabis fans get higher still around me, I thought it was a question worth pondering: Was it possible to make my brand as recognizable as that black dog or that swoosh or that smiling Boston patriot brandishing a tankard of beer?
I didn’t know it then, but I was about to be handed one tool to hasten that brand recognition. Our first order of business, even before setting up our booth, was to drop off our 40-gram samples for the cannabis competition. Over the course of ten days, the judges would be smoking the entrants’ weed, and the winners would be announced on the last night of the show.
We didn’t overthink our entry that year. We were justifiably proud of our SkunkBerry strain because we were the first company to produce it commercially. Brandon, my second grower, introduced us to it, and the strain was flourishing in Corey’s care.
It’s an interesting little bud. SkunkBerry has a very potent odor of skunk, which is mellowed by a very real fragrance of blueberry pie. The two flavors temper each other. The skunk never gets angry; it’s just tangy. The blueberry is sweet, not cloying. And in the background, if you wait for it, you’ll detect a pleasing sharp, astringent odor that also comes through in the taste of the smoke. It is very distinctive.
This strain does well in our shops, but we didn’t really know how the judges would take to it. When you’re smoking SkunkBerry, you know it. There’s nothing subtle about it. The flavors are so clearly different from what you just smoked or are about to smoke. Would the judges enjoy that palate shift, or not?
Come Sunday, the exhibitors closed up shop and cleared the floor. Attendees packed in to hear the announcements. Typically, the smaller awards are read off first, but today, for some reason, the judges started at the top and worked their way down.
Corey had convinced me that his “lucky spot” was standing in the back of the room. So we had all congregated together far from the stage. Just as things got started, I heard the judges say, “Green Man Cannabis!”
“Hey, they called out our name!” I said to one of my employees. “What was that for?”
“I think it was for the Cannabis Cup for Hybrid!”
This is the highest award in the industry, given for general excellence. The Best Picture Oscar for Marijuana, you might say. Because our industry is small, those who win the Cannabis Cup are roundly accorded bragging rights for the rest of their lives.
I didn’t think it was probable.
“No,” I told the employee. “It can’t be. They must be starting from the third prize and working their way up.”
“No, you won!” someone said. “Go! Go get your prize!”
I felt the shove of a half dozen hands, pushing me toward the stage.
We were so far in the back of the room that the judges had assumed we were no longer present. Someone else had leaped forward to accept the prize on my behalf. But then, just as he was walking away, I popped up on stage followed by my partners and employees.
“Oh, wait,” someone said. “Green Man is here.”
I was stunned. My hands were trembling, I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I’d started this business three years ago, and now our company and its employees had taken an award known throughout the world for cannabis excellence.
Tell me: In what other industry in corporate America could a young company achieve such an award in so short a time?
I was so grateful. I could not have done it without our team, especially our grower Corey. He now had three Cannabis Cup wins under his belt.
The actual cup is an underwhelming trophy. An acquaintance of mine once showed me the trophy he had won for mixed doubles at Wimbledon, and I was surprised how small it was. I suppose I had expected something along the lines of the 25-pound Heisman Trophy. The Cannabis Cup was nothing like that: it was only 7 inches tall from its base to the top of the cup, and the caduceus—the snakes-and-staff symbol that signifies the medical field—served as the stem, morphing into two iconic-looking marijuana leaves that held up a golden bowl.
I took the cup and waved it over my head.
The audience went wild.