Taking the high road: The Grass origin story
I was at the top of my game at the beginning of 2018. In my eight years in tech media, I’d launched an award-winning digital magazine, created the world’s largest grant for immersive arts, and produced the most popular sex robot video on YouTube. I’d worked my way up to become Editor-in-Chief of Engadget, one of the most popular consumer tech publications on the planet, and I was miserable. The tech industry, far from the disruptive force it claimed to be, had fallen into the same patterns of corporate greed and institutional inequality that have long been the hallmarks of other billion dollar industries. I was over it.
That January, I took a trip to London to shoot an episode of my web series, Computer Love. My crew and I were working on our most ambitious episode to date: a 20-minute documentary about the origins and ethics of the sex robot. Unbeknownst to us, it would also be our last.
Back at home in California, a series of events were underway that would change history and, in turn, the trajectory of my career. Two years prior, I’d voted along with close to 8,000,000 others to approve Proposition 64, effectively legalizing the adult use of cannabis in the state. While I was digging deep on the ethics of fuck machines in England, people across the pond were experiencing legal weed for the first time.
Meanwhile, my frequent collaborator and one of my closest friends, Reena Karia was pursuing a distribution license with her husband just on the edges of Silicon Valley. She’d spent months buried in paperwork, jumping through regulatory hoops, and courting investors. She needed a break and I needed an escape.
“Our chemistry was undeniable from our very first class project: a get out the vote campaign featuring popular porn stars that managed to draw a collective gasp from a packed auditorium. ”
So we met me in London before flying to southern Spain for a few days of quiet contemplation and loads of Sherry. It was on one long, Sherry-soaked night that we planted the seeds of The Grass Agency. We’d spent the evening walking aimlessly around the streets of Jerez, eventually landing at an after-hours spot catering to performers from a local Flamenco festival. We passed the night in fits of laughter, throwing back to our rebellious days in journalism school, our divergent paths after college, and our unlikely reunion in the Bay Area.
Our chemistry was undeniable from our very first class project: a get out the vote campaign featuring popular porn stars that managed to draw a collective gasp from a packed auditorium. Since then we’d worked on global-scale media projects, designed stages and trophies for trade shows like CES, and launched a one-of-a-kind immersive art event in Los Angeles. We’d done a lot together, but we’d always done it for someone else. That night in Spain, as we put the finishing touches on our latest collaboration, a GIF-heavy Instagram story, something clicked. She was embarking on a new chapter, I was getting ready to jump ship, and the state of California was about to be changed forever.
It was time for our ultimate collaboration.
We grew up on the edges of Texas, where pot is still very much illegal – she in the small Southeast Texas town of Beaumont and me in the sprawling border city of El Paso. Up until college, the only weed we could get our hands on smelled like cat shit, tasted like saw dust, and was just as likely to give you a headache as it was to get you high. When we both landed in California over a decade ago, our eyes were open to a whole new world of weed: one where people talked about strains like wine varietals and made distinctions between things like Indica and Sativa, THC and CBD. There were vapes, and dabs, and edibles and a whole movement around wellness that we’d never seen in Texas. Legal weed was the future and schwag was a thing of our past.
“Up until college, the only weed we could get our hands on smelled like cat shit, tasted like saw dust, and was just as likely to give you a headache as it was to get you high. When we both landed in California over a decade ago, our eyes were open to a whole new world of weed: one where people talked about strains like wine varietals and made distinctions between things like Indica and Sativa, THC and CBD. ”
With legalization spreading across the US, we saw an opportunity to introduce others to what we’d discovered. So we created The Grass Agency, a full-service design and marketing firm focused solely on the cannabis industry. But shaping the next generation of household names wasn’t enough. We’d spent decades building brands for other people; now it was time to build our own. In April, we launched The Grass Guide, a handbook to California’s cannabis culture. Since then we’ve traveled across the Golden State, immersing ourselves in an industry still trying to find its footing. We traversed the Coachella Valley, where we visited a town saved by cannabis cultivation and stayed in the state’s first bud and breakfast; we made our way to Los Angeles, where we celebrated our first collaboration, a 4/20 Feast with dope dinner series, Pop Cultivate; and we hit the road to Santa Rosa for Hall of Flowers, a highly curated cannabis trade show.
Since our launch, we’ve met everyone from the so-called father of the cannabis industry, Steve DeAngelo, to Lori Ajax, the woman in charge of California’s regulatory body, the Bureau of Cannabis Control. We’ve kicked it with TV hosts, YouTube influencers, and investment bankers all looking for their slice of the pot pie. We’ve heard stories of decades-long businesses going to seed and the creeping influence of Silicon Valley in the remote recesses of Humboldt county. What’s emerged is a picture of an industry not yet meeting its full potential, a state struggling to control a previously illicit market, and a cultural revolution grappling with a complicated history.
This isn’t the post-prohibition utopia we were sold during the 2016 election. It’s not the lawless dystopia we were warned of as children either. This is our new reality, and it’s up to us to shape it.