Smoke Signals
When it comes to medical cannabis packaging, it’s an aesthetic thing.
By Stephanie Smittle
Gone are the early days in the Arkansas cannabis industry when patients were sent home from the dispensary with their flower tucked away in a generic, lime green prescription canister, with no signage to denote the strain or origin. These days, dispensary shelves are highly curated real estate, meant to spark delight and interest with vibrant product design. Like the velvety matte finish on a box of couture coffee beans or the clean aesthetic of the bottle your favorite facial moisturizer comes in, cannabis packaging sends clues to the patient about what’s inside.
It’s a nature textbook look for the White Hall-based cultivator.
When it comes to the bold golden cannabis leaf that curls gently around Natural State Medicinals’ logo, Matt Dedman said, NSM took a page from drawings from The Explorers Club, the famous New York-based organization whose members, since 1905, have traversed the planet in the name of scientific inquiry. “The same way that the Audubon Club used to go out and draw birds when they first saw them or discovered them, explorers used to do the same thing for plants.” Add to that bit of inspiration Dedman’s playlist — heavy these days on Talking Heads, Fontaines D.C., King Gizzard, Remi Wolf and the “Pure Moods” compilation.
For the reggae artist who inspired the gummies, it’s a state of mind.
There’s a playlist you can cue up by scanning the package on The Source Apothecary’s new flavor of THC-CBD-CBG gummies, Island Time. That’s the influence of Rochelle Bradshaw, a reggae musician from Portland, Jamaica, who began as a budtender with The Source and now has her own namesake product on the shelves which, the package quotes Bradshaw, “hits hard, just like I like, without bringing on the munchies.” Like its cannabinoid mix, the mix of flavors is a sort of fruit punch, Caribbean-style. “It’s all the fruits that I enjoyed growing up on the island,” Bradshaw told us. “You know, the mangoes, the bananas, guavas, pineapple, coconut.” The combined effect, she told us, “puts me into my island state that I want to share with everyone. It’s not downtime. Island time just puts you in that space where you get whatever you need to get done, and you’re in a great mood while you’re doing it, you know?”
DIZPOT’s all in on ethical cannabis packaging.
John Hartsell, co-founder of a Phoenix-based company called DIZPOT, spent his career in advertising and design before venturing into the cannabis industry, and it shows. This paper tube (yes, that’s paper!) just received its U.S. Patent, and it’s biodegradable, child resistant, smell proof and food grade. Oh, and the lid can be recycled, too, making the whole package pretty sustainability-minded. A self-described “passionate cannabis advocate,” Hartsell told us he’s long had his eyes on working in the industry. “Now that we have DIZPOT,” he said, “I know this is the industry where I will finish my career.”
Pure Pharma’s clean look is all about being a wellness company.
For a certain kind of skincare nerd, Pure Pharma’s dropper bottles look like they might dispense a wrinkle-reducing retinol, maybe, or a refreshing toner. In fact, you might well find CBD tinctures from Pure Pharma’s CBD arm, Pure Pharma Botanicals, at the very same places you get that wrinkle cream — Drug Emporium, Vitamins Plus. Owner and license holder Chris Gibson told us the design was done in-house, spearheaded by one of the company’s original owners, who’s also a pharmacist. “When we first formed as a company,” Gibson said, “she and her daughter came up with the color palette, look, feel, the spiral logo.” The cannabis space at the time, he said, was cluttered with louder, attention-grabbing designs, and they wanted something clean and minimalist. “One of the things this company has always been about is consumer confidence in the products,” he said, and the idea was that people who read the labels at grocery stores would want to know, too, what was in their tinctures. “We’re a wellness company. Our target customer isn’t the person who’s trying to get high for the least amount of money. … We’ve been teased a little for the name — for including pharma in the name — even though, you know, traditionally, pharmacology is all botanical.”
