A new report tracking 83 celebrity cannabis brands across North America finds fewer than half are still operating. The ones that survived share four things in common.
In the early years of legal cannabis, celebrity brands looked like an obvious bet. A famous name could open doors that ordinary brands couldn’t, generate press that money couldn’t buy and lend credibility to an industry still fighting for mainstream acceptance. For a while, that was enough.
A new report suggests the gap between the two was always bigger than the press cycles made it look.
The State of Celebrity Cannabis Brands report, shared exclusively ahead of publication by Above Board, a cannabis mystery shopping and retail audit firm, tracked 83 celebrity cannabis brands across North America and verified each classification against actual dispensary menus, Headset data, Leafly, Weedmaps and brand website activity. Of those 83 brands, 38 are now classified as defunct. Four more never produced a single product. Two others technically exist but have no meaningful retail presence.
The picture that emerges is not of a gimmick that was doomed from the start. Having covered celebrity cannabis for years, I’ve seen the early argument up close: famous names helped normalize a category that desperately needed it, giving consumers permission to walk into a dispensary for the first time. But the report puts hard numbers on what many inside the industry have known for a while: celebrity involvement was never a business plan. It was an opening move.
“Celebrities offered something the cannabis industry desperately needed in its early years — legitimacy,” Sara Gluck, founder of Above Board, said in an email. “A famous name on a dispensary door told consumers it was okay to walk in. That was genuinely valuable. The problem is that legitimacy and operations are different skills.”
That distinction, it turns out, predicted almost everything that came next.
Read the full article at Forbes
