34 NOVEMBER 30-DECEMBER 6, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | REAL ESTATE | RENTALS | HEALTH WELLNESS | SERVICES | EMPLOYMENT | ADULT | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | FIND MORE MARIJUANA COVERAGE AT WESTWORD.COM/MARIJUANA Joint Effort BY THOMAS MITC HELL The motto of Hunter Garth’s new pre-roll company, Joints, is straight to the point: Pre-Rolls That Don’t Suck. A longtime cannabis industry member, the former Marine founded a marijuana business security fi rm in 2013 before selling it and working in corporate cannabis for fi ve years. After taking a break, Garth returned to the ganja game with a few friends earlier this year, launching Joints in January. Noticing a few trends in a stagnant mar- ket, Garth believes that he and his crew are on to something by bringing some levity to cannabis marketing — without sacrifi cing on nugs, of course. “It’s fun to make fun of big business or big weed. We’re not really trying to push ourselves on the bigger stores. Just because you order a lot of product doesn’t mean we’re going to bend over backward,” Garth ex- plains. “We think it’s refreshing to see people actually enjoying themselves in 2023.” We learned more about the business in the following interview: Westword: What made you want to jump back into the cannabis industry? Why choose pre-rolls as your launch pad? Hunter Garth: I had a lot of educational equity in cannabis. I was previously a Ma- rine and didn’t go to school, so all of my business education came from cannabis. I just couldn’t let go of all those contacts and relationships. This opportunity with my partner, Michael Pumphrey, came with a bunch of people who had worked for me in the past — our sales guy, our designer and a woman who owned the company, Wonder Leaf, that we bought to turn into this. We’re all fl ower people, so we all came together and decided to use the license for this. If 7 to 10 percent of the product at any given dispensary is pre-rolled joints and they’re universally bad, that felt like an opportunity to us. There’s $150 million worth of joints sold every year, but they’re all bad. It’s all leftover or bad material. So we thought of our favorite way to smoke weed, which is a joint — but what is the best joint? It’s a joint that you rolled from fl ower you chose and ground. That’s not commercially viable for a million reasons, but we want to get as close to that as possible. And how do you do that? We are going to only buy good material. The price of material, or good fl ower, has collapsed over the last four years, which was factor num- ber one here. Then we came up with our own grind process, because so many pre-rolls are full of green powder if you take them apart. So we had to develop that and the right papers. We use a larger cone and do maximum order quantities in order to move the joints faster and limit the time fl ower spends in paper. From a packaging and marketing perspec- tive, we’ve been in cannabis forever. Many of us came from corporate cannabis, and it’s gross. Trying to make cannabis seem like it belongs at a CVS or hair salon removes the fun from it. We use a lot of different tubes and colors to communicate to consumers that this is a fresh tube, so they know what they’re smoking hasn’t been on the shelf for very long. We’re a group of young stoners, and we intend to have fun and communicate that to the market in a way that feels authentic, welcomed and commonsense. We’re really just talking about weed for what it is and making fun of weed for what it is. We don’t take ourselves seriously. Since January, we’re in over eighty stores. We’ve seen a handful of popular growers release their own lines of joints recently. How much has the quality and interest in pre-rolls increased over the last year? Convincing a marketplace that pre-rolls don’t suck might be the hardest task in the world. Oddly enough, that can be overturned by just trying them, but you still have to convince the marketplace. It’s one thing to convince a dispensary’s purchase manager — and I do be- lieve that the quality of pre-rolls has increased — but I don’t think the market has leaned into that yet. Convenience still carries the day, and there are few products as convenient as a joint. There’s a value to altering your state of consciousness, and a $5 or $10 joint marries up really well with that. Businesses used to view that as an opportunity where they could take advantage of margins, but we’re in a different chapter of weed now. You’ve got to compete and really earn trust in a purchase. Now people are recognizing that consumers are getting smarter, even if convenience is still driving the product. You’ve worked with some hot growers so far. How does the selection process work? We don’t buy on brand, we buy on harvest. We choose them by getting samples and breaking them up in day-by-day pill holders for our employees to use, and if a lot of them really like whatever bud was in Tuesday, then that’s what we go with. Our employees don’t know which weed is grown by whom. It just happens to be that some grows have a lot of sample wins, and we continue to use them. It certainly helps that some have built brands for their product, especially as a new company working with them. It’s a real collaboration in business, and not just taking someone’s fl ower and putting paper on it. The Joints Instagram page does a good job of highlighting your employees’ personalities through spoofs on social media trends and can- nabis fads. How much thought goes into that? [Social media is] all so stale. At the end of the day, what are we really doing? Do we want to buy expensive camera gear to showcase a joint, or is this group of people the brand? The people who are picking the fl ower, designing a pre-roll, delivering it — let’s not spend a bunch of marketing dollars. Let’s showcase them to build this brand. For us, it makes more sense to be authentic and market directly, and maybe create an alli- ance of people who will go out there and tell others to check us out. We’re not playing the Instagram game for followers. We just want to connect with other businesses, show that we give a fuck about the weed and, really, just have fun. I know it doesn’t seem like a novel idea, but it appears to be that way in cannabis right now. Suggest future interview subjects at [email protected]. Joints employees don’t take themselves too seriously. MARIJUANA T O K E O F T H E T O W N FRESH JOINTS
