rewrite this title and make it good for SEOHow Old Pal built a cannabis brand rooted in community

Some cannabis brands stand out not just for their products but also for the distinct culture and philosophy they cultivate.

Old Pal is one of them.

The Venice, California-based company has carved out a niche with its emphasis on community, accessibility and a laid-back approach to cannabis.

Old Pal CEO Rusty Wilenkin recently spoke with MJBizDaily about the brand’s journey, his insights on the industry’s trajectory and how the company continues to champion its core values.

Community is central to your identity. How do you think other cannabis brands can foster community engagement? And why is this important to the industry?

When we started the business in 2018, education was super, super important – adult-use cannabis was still a new idea.

We did a lot of simple education.

We’re not the people that are out there talking about terpenes and their effects on you and things like that. We’re simple cannabis people.

We’re like, “Hey, you can have a great time smoking a joint with your friends.”

What we did was classes like how to roll a joint, how to make an apple pipe, which is how a lot of people smoke weed for the first time.

We do fun community events that get people interacting with cannabis in a way where they get more comfortable with it.

We’re not a celebrity brand. We’re not like a Cookies or something like that.

Our brand is built on everyday connection with the consumer.

That’s being in the dispensary, executing events, that’s being at the trade shows and events around the industry.

You’re not going to build a massive brand by talking to every single person that buys it.

But I do think you can have really meaningful interactions with the people that sell it.

When we look at community, we look at it a lot of different ways.

There’s the people that buy our product, there’s the people that farm our product, and we try to engage with all the people at the farm all the way through the value chain to the end consumer.

We recently did an event at Mammoth Mountain on 4/20.

It was like a Burton pool party thing that we had a rolling station set up at with my buddy Noah Rubin, who has a book called “How We Roll (The Art and Culture of Joints, Blunts, and Spliffs)” that’s all about rolling joints.

And we did a how-to-roll-a joint-activation with a bunch of pro snowboarders.

There’s a growing emphasis on normalization and destigmatization in the industry. How do you contribute to that, and what changes do you believe are necessary for further progress?

When it comes to normalization, I think we’re on the path right now, both between the regulated cannabis industry and what’s going on in hemp.

You’re just seeing more and more people interacting with these products across the country and realizing that a lot of the myths they were told – if they’re from certain generations – are lies, and you can have a great time using cannabis.

On the normalization side, it feels like that ball is rolling.

We take every opportunity we can to interact with people, to educate them about cannabis, to tell them about what we’re doing in the space.

When it comes to the destigmatization, I don’t want to say we’re not doing anything there.

We have a beautiful brand. We communicate properly. We don’t speak a crazy way.

We’re not like a brand with half-naked women on the packaging and cartoons and trying to appeal to children.

We’re a more refined, mature brand. But we also embrace stoner culture. It’s a big part of our brand.

A lot of our imagery and inspiration is ’60s and ’70s hippies.

As much as I want everyone to be comfortable and to love our brand, I actually think a big part of our brand is continuing a bit of that culture.

I don’t think we want our brand to be so sterile that it feels like a pharmaceutical company or like something else.

We want weed to be fun and playful and people to call it weed and like to sort of have fun with it.

Your ready-to-roll concept addressed a specific consumer need. What are some of the other unmet needs emerging in the cannabis market that could drive innovation?

It definitely addressed a need. We’re having a lot of fun with that product now.

As we start reimagining it, we’ve seen consumers push for some high-potency offerings.

Infused products have really gained popularity, and for us to sort of meet the consumers where they are, we’ve been playing with a couple of different infusions for that primo blend.

It’s our regular ready to roll, but infused with a high-terpene extract or, in some markets, rosin.

When you open the bag, it looks like beautiful ground cannabis. You can usually see a diamond or two from the concentrates in there.

And, you know, because of the concentrate, it’s even more aromatic and it has a longer shelf life, and the potency is just where the consumer wants it to be.

We really believe in convenient form factors. We still see a hole in the market for blunts.

We’ve been pushing them pretty aggressively across the country. We do a large, 2-gram blunt.

I grew up in New York, where there’s a real blunt culture.

And it kind of reminds me of being a younger person smoking weed for the first time and passing like a large blunt around with a group of like eight people.

That was our experience.

Our 2-gram blunt with a glass tip and a cigar band to me feels like a premium experience you can share with five, six or seven friends and everyone’s going to have a great time.

It’s infused. It tests super high, and it feels pretty elegant.

A lot of people play in effect-based and things like that.

So we’ve always sort of tended to lean more on to making products people have a great time using versus making products that’ll make you sleepy, awake, run faster, jump higher, whatever.

We just don’t like to make those claims.

What’s your long-term vision for Old Pal?

Our goal is to really stay the course and stay focused.

There’s so many opportunities to say yes to doing things that don’t necessarily fit what we see as the future of our business.

I think a lot of people are jaded from the boom-bust cycles of this industry.

My partner (Jason Osni) and I joke, we were really lucky that we came into it broke, because it makes it easier to stay the course.

But I still tend to believe we’re in the first or second inning of weed. I don’t believe we’re in the eighth or ninth inning.

I think there’s so much more to come, both in terms of states and countries and legalization and interstate commerce.

I got into this business because I was so excited to see an industry sort of rise from nothing to something.

What are you most optimistic about when you consider the future of the industry and your place in it?

In terms of the future of the industry, I only think it gets easier.

Federal legalization will bring its own set of challenges, but long term – to go from a day where people used to still get arrested and thrown in jail for doing something that was actually legal to now – I think we’ve made a lot of progress.

I’m excited that we have a business that’s known for doing things the right way, both at the consumer level and at the business level.

Most everyone we’ve worked with speaks highly of us.

Being able to do right by our employees, our customers and our partners for the past seven years has been a real blessing, and that’s what I hope we can continue to do.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Margaret Jackson can be reached at margaret.jackson@mjbizdaily.com.