What is going on with weed branding?

It's at an all-time low.

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It is true, and also difficult to believe, that stoner culture has taken a massive hit since weed has been legalized. Back in 2012, my friend’s mom literally cried after she caught him smoking when he was home from college, and now she makes Facebook posts like, “When you’re at Disney with the hubby and the gummy kicks in 😅.” I will also never forget how one of the nerdy girls in my high school smoked weed one summer and came back senior year and became an insufferable and performative pothead, and now she works for a military contractor. More normies are toking, but the people who try to fit the stoner persona are becoming more obnoxious.

In the context of today’s shrinking, degrading, belligerently mid corporate culture, it’s not just the quality but the quantity of iffy weed branding that beggars belief. Modern chain dispensaries feel so swaggerless and gnarly, and it’s almost traumatizing to walk up to a budtender and request a strain called Blueberry Crunchy Space Toast and wonder if you just ordered a rejected Dairy Queen Blizzard. And, to a degree that it is notable given my general struggles to keep up with all these emerging options, I roll my eyes after coming across a product that attempts a pun. I once saw a bag called “Stankosaurus Rekt” and it had a picture of a T-Rex with bloodshot eyes.

All the designs on weed products were made by the kids who were stuck in detention carving their initials into the bottom of desks. You wouldn’t put these on the back of JNCO jeans. Really, the problem is that I’m in my 30s, and smoking weed is becoming less of a good look, so I can’t walk around with a bag of edibles with the Grim Reaper on the front ripping three blunts at once. This isn’t effective branding; these are doodles you would see on an eighth-grader’s algebra homework in the margins.

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