The New York-based company has customized packages for companies including Colorado-based Seed and Smith. It also joined forces with Marvel comic illustrator Adam Pollina to create labels for famous marijuana strains. The label for Gorilla Glue depicts a jaded-looking gorilla wearing a top hat smoking a joint with a burger, fries and a pet cat. The container for Girl Scout Cookies, another popular strain, shows vest-wearing girls tagging a brick wall with a marijuana leaf.
Childproof Bags
Pollen Gear makes childproof bags, called exit bags, for weed packages that don’t meet state safety standards. These bags are increasingly branded. It also makes rectangular containers with tops that pop off only if you squeeze on two specific points. The field is wide open for innovative packaging, Kilduff said.
“If you Google weed packaging, the whole front page of Google is just all companies importing the same exact product from China and they’re just competing on pennies,” he said. “As a product designer, that’s the coolest opportunity. It’s like a green field.”
Not that Kilduff doesn’t have competition. Kush Bottles Inc. has been serving the weed industry since it was founded in 2010, before any state had legalized recreational cannabis use. As more and more states ended marijuana prohibition, the Santa Ana, California-based company expanded.
Kush, which is publicly traded, started out supplying the utilitarian items in demand for the fledgling industry. It now sells pop-tops, exit bags, concentrate containers, gloves for dispensary workers, rolling papers, lighters, glass bongs, pipes and more.
“We want to be more professional, we want to be pushing the industry,” said Chief Executive Officer Nick Kovacevich. “There’s a cannabis culture as well, so it’s about blending.”
Increasingly, though, Kush’s clientele is asking for more custom branding. The company recently created a wide-mouthed container with a push-in, lift-up tab to better accommodate edibles and larger quantities of cannabis flower.
“People buy their booze based on the marketing and the advertising and the shape of the bottle,” and cannabis’ time has now come, too, said Pollen Gear’s Kilduff. “There’s so many things to make.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.