CANNABIS BRANDING // BATCH SEVEN + HERB & LEGEND
I am not a stoner (no disrespect). But it turns out that writing for cannabis products is very fun. I helped develop brand manifestos, copy guidelines, website and product copy, and even fun little magical postcards telling folks what kind of adventure their THC-enhanced treats might take them on.
My role: copywriter, brand voice
Art direction & design: Betsy Filson
BATCH SEVEN
Mindfulness meets on-demand cannabis delivery in this brand named for San Francisco’s seven hills.
HERB & LEGEND
This brand is what would happen if you threw every bizarre California subculture into a whirlwind, but made it pretty.
Brand manifesto
We’re mystic pixie dream girls and boys (like manic pixies without all the baggage). We’ve been out in the desert meditating but we stopped for In-N-Out on the way back. We’re of the moment but hold in our soul the whole history of California, of generations and generations of misfits and dreamers, skaters and punks. We’re lovers of stories and might drop references to urban legends and ancient myths, to local poetry from beat to hip hop, from King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster to Joan Didion and back again (by way of the Goonies). We’re high and highbrow and lowbrow all at once. We have an air of mystery but we’re easy to be friends with. We’d like to welcome you in, offer you a cup of tea, and share a tale, a toke, and a treasure map.
Retail concepts
Each store location revolved around local lore and legends. I helped develop stories for the brand’s Sonoma and North Beach locations. This might not sound super interesting, but just you wait.
Sonoma
Where the land bears fruit, where the sun is unimpeded outside of the redwood groves, the grasses brown against the hills, where the Miwok people say Coyote perched when he decided to make the world. Where Burbank created a kind of botanical Eden, conjured peaches, plums, pears. The mouth waters. Where Ripley dared us to believe it or not, and we chose to believe. Just south of the Emerald Triangle where the cannabis plant thrives, we too bloom here, ducking in and out of shade like hawks, coaxed by the daily dance of sun and night. A green rush of courage heartens generations of farmers to entice a new kind of magic from a fantastical herb. This place’s legends stroll hand in hand with paradigm shifts and determined tendrils of grapevine, with rumored hauntings and musical ghosts that send notes sparking toward the sky.
North Beach
North Beach, a storied neighborhood in the city of myth, where shrines to saints were built on Barbary Coast rubble, iniquity and transcendence mingling like the scents of espresso and garlic, like foghorns and Fernet. Invented and reinvented, gold rush city, beatnik city, city with bridges disappearing into fog, a streak of international orange shifting in and out of view. This is our home, this fabled place. Local legends twist through us like the tunnels that run beneath our feet, as do the pulse of the tides and the underwater palette of greens, blues, and shimmery flecks of sun in the vast Pacific (and the creatures that may dwell there). There is a world of magic that exists underneath our world that cannabis helps us see. There is a San Francisco, too, that lives beneath the tourist-friendly version, one that’s far more enigmatic, alluring, and fascinating. Let us welcome you in, open your eyes, spin you around, and send you back out into mythic North Beach—pondering parrots, pirates, or maybe just pizza.
