Optimist

A Funny California Weed Brand

Optimist started with a simple observation. The majority of cannabis brands fall into the polarizing part of a spectrum. Either they’re trying to be Apple or Tesla, or they are trying too hard to be hip and fit into such a specific niche that it's alienating to people not in that niche.

We felt there was plenty of white space in the middle to make fun of everyone and bring irreverent hilarity to the cannabis space…after all, weed is supposed to be fun!

With that my co-founder, Daniel Dranove of Cards Against Humanity and I decided WE should start a hilarious weed brand and leverage my experience in marketing & tech, and his experience developing the outrageous stunt based marketing playbook of Cards Against Humanity.

At first, Optimist started as a hardware company. Leveraging my hardware experience from Inboard, we went to China, toured vape factories, and developed our own ODM cannabis concentrate vaporizer. We worked with the fantastic team at Whiplash in SF to design our final product and handled the engineering & manufacturing leveraging with a mix of onshore and offshore talent.

Getting a new RECYCLABLE single use hardware vaporizer to market wasn’t too hard…but finding a great, white-market cannabis partner took us almost 2 years. After much stumbling around in the darkness, we met the team at Big Rock Ventures, who signed on to be our advisors, and help us bring our hilarious vape dreams to life.

We put together a test-launch and brought Optimist to market in October 2021.

After 6 months of decent sales and experimenting with marketing in our limited region, we decided that our smart vapes weren’t the ticket to growth we had hoped for. So we decided to pivot the product offering of the business into pre-rolls and bags of flower.

PIVOT!

Optimist Pivots to Flower & Pre-rolls

Our pivot involved creating a new supply chain from the ground up, which I had the pleasure to take the lead on. After much testing and meeting with different possible partners across the state of California, we settled on working with our friends at Big Rock Ventures again, who owned a majority stake in Sonoma Hills Farms, a high-end outdoor cannabis farm in Sonoma county.

We launched the brand at Hall of Flowers, Palm Springs in December 2021. The B2B event space was a great way for us to expose ourselves to the market, meet tons of other vendors, and make a splash with buyers from across the state and get on the radar of buyers across the country.

Thanks to our innovative experiential marketing (our founders team did all the creative and production) we came up with a hilarious and irreverent way to break the ice and get folks to talk to us in our booth. The Optimist Hole of Glory!

“Are you an Optimist? Only one way to find out, stick your hand in our Glory Hole and see what sort of surprise you pull out! Put your hand in, palm up, and not too deep!”

At our glory hole we gave away a hilarious mix of prizes, swag, and gag gifts that got the entire convention talking. Pickled Egg in a bag, bananas, kiwi’s, Cards Against Humanity ‘Weed Pack’ ex[ansion packs, stickers, headbands, novelty japanese soda’s, condoms, raw meat, even coupons that could be redeemed for samples of our weed at the onsite dispensary!

Our re-launch of the brand was a wild success, we went from no one knowing who we were on day 1, to by the middle of day 2 of the event people were breathlessly running up to our booth shouting

‘...Are you guys from Cards Against Humanity? Do you have a weed brand ?

Are you giving away weed in a glory hole?!”

It was a fantastic experience and allowed us to land several high-profile retail accounts across California.

Please check out the site at TheOptimist.IS