I grew up smoking cannabis—or “pot,” as I called it until about 20 minutes ago—crouching in a fetid little nook between a dumpster and a stack of tires at the neighborhood Texaco station, a place that already smelled like shit and where a few puffs of smoke and a little coughing wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention.
If, like me, you came of age before legalization, you will recall one thing about procuring weed back in the day: You didn’t have a lot of choices. In fact, you had one: nickel bag or a dime bag. You couldn’t specify indica or sativa, flower or edible, tincture or rosin or vape. You couldn’t select your THC content. You couldn’t choose between OG Kush or Bombay Crush, between Cheese Dog and Chem Dawg, between Grape Ape and Gorilla Glue. No. You got whatever Danny’s older brother sold you. And you were stoked.
But that was then and this is now, and the cannabis space has entered a fascinating, fast-flowing moment where legalization—which begat commercialization, which begat corporatization, which begat commodification—has created today’s modern dispensary where the choices for consumers can be dizzying. As it turns out, there may be no better gauge of the changes rippling through cannabis culture than the humble menu at your local dispensary. Weed names have always added to the fun and intrigue (as a teen, even the relatively straightforward Thai Stick sounded entrancingly exotic), but today, as the power dynamic shifts from seller to buyer, and as growers and retailers find themselves strategizing to make their products stand out on increasingly crowded shelves, the names are taking on even more importance.
The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss.
Cat Piss?
Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?
The question of who names my weed has actually been banging around in my head since sometime late in 1978, when I was on the far side of 13 and my bar mitzvah money was burning a hole in my OP shorts. I’d managed to score a small bag of Maui Waui, and as a friend and I passed an anorexic doobie back and forth behind the Texaco tires, we ended up repeating the words Maui Waui Maui Waui—a name full of rhyme and promise—again and again until they became nothing more than strange sounds in our mouths. I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny’s older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand.
I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. “It’s a really complex time for naming,” one longtime farmer told me. That’s because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We’re no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed “I’ll have the tincture, please” wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. (...)
I’m speaking with the man who gave the name “Outback” to Subaru, the name “Pentium” to Intel’s processor, the man who named the Swiffer, the Blackberry, the Impossible Burger, not to mention Dasani, Sonos, and Febreze. His name is David Placek, and David Placek and I are talking about weed. Specifically, we’re talking about the names given to cannabis strains and whether Placek, whose Sausalito-based Lexicon Branding has notched some 3,600 consumer product names, thinks the most popular strain names have a winning ring to them. If corporate America ever comes hard for cannabis names, Placek’s insights would likely filter onto dispensary labels.
If, like me, you came of age before legalization, you will recall one thing about procuring weed back in the day: You didn’t have a lot of choices. In fact, you had one: nickel bag or a dime bag. You couldn’t specify indica or sativa, flower or edible, tincture or rosin or vape. You couldn’t select your THC content. You couldn’t choose between OG Kush or Bombay Crush, between Cheese Dog and Chem Dawg, between Grape Ape and Gorilla Glue. No. You got whatever Danny’s older brother sold you. And you were stoked.
The names. Dear lord, the names. Strawberry Cough. Kosher Kush. Blueberry Mojito. Glueberry Slurm. Pineapple Trainwreck. Donkey Butter. Animal Face. Pink Panties. Purple Haze. Sour Joker. Sweet Jesus. Moby Dick. Fugu. Fatso.Tongue Kiss. Cat Piss.
Cat Piss?
Who comes up with this stuff … and how? Stoners trying to out-clever each other with inside stoner jokes about oblique stoner references? Advertising creatives at boutique firms working long hours in Stance socks? Gen Z focus groups run by blue-chip marketing firms with execs staring through one-way mirrors, scribbling notes?
The question of who names my weed has actually been banging around in my head since sometime late in 1978, when I was on the far side of 13 and my bar mitzvah money was burning a hole in my OP shorts. I’d managed to score a small bag of Maui Waui, and as a friend and I passed an anorexic doobie back and forth behind the Texaco tires, we ended up repeating the words Maui Waui Maui Waui—a name full of rhyme and promise—again and again until they became nothing more than strange sounds in our mouths. I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny’s older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand.
I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. “It’s a really complex time for naming,” one longtime farmer told me. That’s because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We’re no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed “I’ll have the tincture, please” wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. (...)
I’m speaking with the man who gave the name “Outback” to Subaru, the name “Pentium” to Intel’s processor, the man who named the Swiffer, the Blackberry, the Impossible Burger, not to mention Dasani, Sonos, and Febreze. His name is David Placek, and David Placek and I are talking about weed. Specifically, we’re talking about the names given to cannabis strains and whether Placek, whose Sausalito-based Lexicon Branding has notched some 3,600 consumer product names, thinks the most popular strain names have a winning ring to them. If corporate America ever comes hard for cannabis names, Placek’s insights would likely filter onto dispensary labels.
by Bill Shapiro, Esquire | Read more:
Image: Humboldt Seed Company’s Nutter Budder strain, sold by Burr’s Place/Kandid Kush
