By the time 4/20 celebrants leave their own brand of fog all over Golden Gate Park, many will have spotted a series of advertisements for a new cannabis brand, one hip to all the buzzwords usually reserved for the aisles of Whole Foods. "Craft farmers. Small batch. Sustainable." This is the kind of weed Alice Waters would be hawking, if Alice Waters hawked weed.
#Ad
The campaign, Mother Jones tells us, comes from a new cannabis collective enterprise called Flow Kana, and they've spent $200,000 on ads from buses to billboards.
"[We] are going all out," Flow Kana founder Michael Steinmetz Mishkin tells Mother Jones, who explain that getting the conditions just right for the company ahead of potential legalization could be crucial. "If we don't get this company to be massively big over the next two years... then we won't be able to compete with the bigger forces that come in," says Mishkin. He hopes smokers will take to the "California Way," per the campaign, the kind undertaken by Florida orange growers or Wisconsin cheese mongers.
"The idea with this campaign is to really showcase who we are, and in so doing create a value for customers that will trickle down for the benefit of the planet," Mishkin says, pointing to grow operations with varying environmental effects.
Furthermore, consider that Flow Kana's partners with who are already hard at work. "It's not like we have to go out and recreate these systems... We just have to leverage the people who have been doing it."
Weed has come a long way from the "wanna buy some grass" days — now, it's the Humboldt County appellation you're buying into — the Emerald Triangle way of life. Hey, just look at all these happy hippies! I'll smoke what they're smoking.
Related: Pipe Dream: Local Stoner-Rap Icon 'Berner' Fights To Formalize 4/20 On Hippie Hill
A Flow Kana advertisement, one in a campaign that launches today.