Where Did This Idea Come From?
To you, we’re the new kids on the block, but Mike and I have known each other for almost 25 years. We were introduced in our teens by a mutual friend who grew up spending summers in my neighborhood at his grandmother’s house and shared some classes with Mike in high school. We were like brothers almost instantly and cannabis was one of the things we shared a passion about. We were both hustling black market brick weed and partying most nights. We used the old paper plate trick to get all the seeds out of an ounce and spent nights rolling Philly after Philly and talking about life. In the late 90’s we started to see “Beasters”, the first sinsemilla that we could regularly get our hands on, coming down from Canada. From there, my brother got us our first Haze and we were blown away by the flavor, smell and high that we were experiencing for the first time. For us as youngsters, this was eye opening and got us looking into the culture of cannabis, not just for partying, but really getting us on the road to becoming connoisseurs. I bought the Cannabible and started reading about DJ Short’s Blueberry strain that he was growing in the canopy of the rain forests in Hawaii.
Mike started to get an interest in growing and we started to look west for some of the strains we were hearing about from the growers out there. In the early 2000’s we started getting packs of Chem 91, Pre 98 Kush, Headband and anything else “exotic” that we could get our hands on. Eighths were $60 or more and ounces were coming in at $400+ and Mike started to explore the medicinal side of cannabis. Mike had always done manual labor and suffered terrible back pain from a fused disc and noticed that his pain would subside or disappear all together when he smoked certain strains. When Rhode Island enacted their medical marijuana program, Mike was one of the first to get a medical card and then became a grower. He got more involved in the cultivation and culture around that over the next 15+ years and got to the point where his name rang out in the circle of growers in RI. My path was a bit different. I was more of a rolling stone; so, while Mike was getting married and starting a family, I was out partying. I was the guy that walked into a party with one friend who knew the people there, and I would just slide onto a couch and toss a bag of gas on the table and start to roll up. People would come over and ask what strain it was, where it came from, if they could smoke with me and how they could get their hands on some. We were both doing our own thing, but we never stopped pursuing the best cannabis and started to focus on the little things that differentiated the really good weed from the best CHOICE weed we could find.
We started looking at the amount of trichomes, terp profiles and how well the weed was cured. We would often smoke the same cannabis from the same batch and discuss what we liked and disliked about it. We couldn’t believe how different our experiences were! From these conversations we saw that there was no “one size fits all” approach to cannabis and that each person can experience the same strain in different ways. The terms “Indica” and “Sativa” doesn’t necessarily give you an idea of the effects of what you’re smoking and that an individual’s body chemistry means as much as the strain’s genetics.
All these conversations have led Mike and I to our philosophy around cannabis and the idea that we want to “Do Cannabis Differently”. We also know that our timing couldn’t be better. The first wave of cannabis in Massachusetts is subsiding and it’s lead to too many dispensaries selling the same strains, from the same producers at the highest prices – even while the weed has been sitting on the shelf for 6 months before it even gets to the dispensary.
We know what good weed looks, smells, and tastes like. We know that just because something is marked “Indica” or “Sativa” that doesn’t necessarily mean you can predict it’s effects. We understand the medical use cases for cannabis and how to help customers pick a product to help reduce their pain, help them sleep or take the edge off of their anxiety. Most of all, we know that people love this plant and the culture that surrounds it, and we want to celebrate that and bring it to life for our customers every day.
