The Sunday Read: ‘How Do You Make a Weed Empire? Sell It Like Streetwear.’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

The closest thing to a bat signal for stoners is the blue lettering of the Cookies logo. When a new storefront comes to a strip mall or a downtown shopping district, fans flock to grand-opening parties, drawn by a love of the brand — one based on more than its reputation for selling extremely potent weed. People often compare Cookies to the streetwear brand Supreme. That’s accurate in one very literal sense — they each sell a lot of hats — and in other, more subjective ones. They share a penchant for collaboration-based marketing; their appeal to mainstream audiences is tied up with their implied connections to illicit subcultures; and they’ve each been expanding rapidly in recent years. All of it is inextricable from Berner, the stage name of Gilbert Milam, 40, Cookies’ co-founder and chief executive, who spent two decades as a rapper with a sideline as a dealer — or as a dealer with a sideline as a rapper. With the company’s success, he is estimated to be one of the wealthiest rappers in the world, without having ever released a hit record.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Ezra Marcus. I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine.
0:11.5	This week's Sunday Reed is my profile of a Bay Area rapper who goes by the name of
0:16.8	Burner. He's a guy you've probably never heard of who in all fairness is not the most accomplished rapper. But he somehow
0:27.0	always ends up alongside Jay Z and Kanya on these lists of the five richest rappers in the world.
0:35.0	That's because Burner is the CEO of cookies,
0:39.0	one of the largest most well-known legal cannabis brands in the United States.
0:45.0	Maybe THE best known.
0:47.0	And what makes Burner fascinating is that in a way he embodies the current state of the cannabis industry as a whole.
0:56.0	On the one side, a weed industry that's legal and yet completely hamstrung by regulation.
1:02.0	And on the other, a black market that's still thriving,
1:06.4	and even facilitated by the supply from the legal side.
1:11.2	A couple decades ago, Burner was working at a medical marijuana dispensary while also
1:17.0	dealing weed on the street.
1:19.6	Weed was on the cusp of becoming recreationally legal in California, and Burner saw an opportunity.
1:27.2	He noticed that when he draw colorful labels for weed strains, they'd sell better. Branding is really important, he figured.
1:35.0	And so he started using rap music as a marketing tool.
1:40.0	He made songs with famous rappers like Wiz Khalifa who embody cannabis as a lifestyle.
1:46.0	And he built his brand around a novel strain of weed called Girl Scout cookies.
1:56.7	He would give out three quarter pounds of it to dealers to spread awareness. It turned burner into an iconic figure. By the 2010s, Burner was selling
2:07.0	t-shirts and hoodies with a cookies logo on them. Then, after Cannabis was legalized, he partnered with investors who transformed
2:16.6	cookies into a real company. But cookies is different from these other large corporate cannabis companies which give off a kind of safe almost medical consumer product kind of vibe.
2:30.5	cookies trades on the romance of the black market and the subcultural
	...

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