In the Stuudiio with cannabis designer Raelina Krikston

How did cannabis users get such a bad reputation as slackers and burn outs? Most of the stoners I know are able to school you on the intricacies of botanical cultivars, detailed historical state legislation, and free market economics. Raelina Krikston, the Creative Director at The Stuudiio (formally Haiikuu Design) is no exception. The Stuudiio is a design and marketing agency based in Eureka, California specializing in minimalist design for all industries.

Before the Coronavirus sent us all to our rooms for ever and ever, I was able to sit down in person with Krikston at our Berkeley studio and talk weed, branding, and the hopefully unsuccessful corporate takeover of cannabis.

Krikston: I just wanted to say I started following you guys because of your pro bono work. I really appreciated that. I encourage all my clients to think about their impact because I don’t think the future of business can be purely profit driven. A lot of cannabis companies have the environmental, sustainable mindset already. But you also have to ask that question: “how are we benefiting society?” as well.

Have you received good client feedback about your socialist sentiments?

I’ve gotten good responses and it depends on who we’re working with. In my experience, you can break cannabis clients into two different groups. The 215 era and the Prop 64 era. In Humboldt, where I live, it is the cradle of the cannabis industry. These people have carried the torch for a long time but there’s a lot of trauma there too. People have cried in my office at the thought of sharing their real name or marketing themselves. There’s a lot of baggage there and so there’s a lot of redicense about getting into the branding game. Just the cost alone of being permitted is stupendous, so asking industry rates for branding, packaging, and design is unthinkable for 98% of the people up there.

Approaching people about branding has been interesting because their mindset is “this shit sells itself. What do you need a brand for?” But the people who do understand branding, they are more often from the corporate world which is more representative of the Prop 64 group. These are people who are growing industry scale in Salinas, one of the most polluted areas in California. Here you can get weed for $300 a pound wholesale and put that in a pretty package.

You walk into a dispensary and you can see who looks good. Nine times out of ten it’s a corporate company who knows how to speak to mainstream America, but don’t know anything about growing quality cannabis. They’re relying on the deficiency of consumer knowledge that exists for this plant. It’s a case of judging a book by its cover.

My first question was going to be about how cannabis is similar to other industries but it sounds like you already answered that question: there are people who have a passion about what they do and then there are corporations. Is that right?

Yes but you need to look at the whole legalization from the beginning. The 215 legalization was a grassroots movement made by the people who were actually growing weed whereas Prop 64 was written by people who have no experience with weed. They just wanted to make a lot of money out of it. They wanted to take over and squeeze out other people who had been in the game before and model it to suit their needs. There’s so much bureaucracy to go through, and so much money that is needed in order to sell legal cannabis that it is resulting in a bloody war of attrition. Of course they might have tried going through the process of getting farmers to help write legislation but farmers didn’t back it. They didn’t have people at the table representing the farmers so the (prop 64) legislation fell short.

There’s varying degrees of conspiracy theory of whether it was trying to hurt or help the farmer. The way it’s built now, the cannabis business is taxed 60%. I’m not a math whiz but that isn’t a way to make a practical business selling weed.

Sounds like the product can be pretty bad. Are you saying the consumer doesn’t know or doesn’t care?

Krikston: They just don’t know. If you have never had beer before and I gave you a lager that was skunked you would think: “Oh, this is beer.” There are tons of brands that are relying on branding alone. At the beginning some brands had connections in Humboldt but then started buying $300 Salinas weed and selling it under the guise of sun-kissed, rain-fed cannabis, it’s bull shit. Now they are multi-state. This isn’t a single farm. It’s investment money that’s coming in and making a grab at the cannabis market.

So how do you bring honest design and branding to the cannabis market?

It starts with education. Everything I do is foundationally educational marketing. The best example of that is Woody Ridge Farm. My client Dave is great. He is so cognizant of his impact in everything he does. It’s real craftsmanship. Addressing the glut of plastic used in cannabis packaging, we use paper tubes for pre-roll packaging and food grade steel containers for flower. Steel is one of the only sustainable packaging materials that are available to us since China changed its contamination levels for what they would accept for recycling, so US recycling has just been going to a landfill since 2018. Unless your local municipality has the capabilities to recycle, not just sort but recycle, it’s being thrown away. However we’ve had the ability to recycle steel since the ’70s. So 80% of the steel used today has been in use since the 1890s.

There’s a lot to be said about the story of different farms as well. Woody Ridge has been growing OG since the ‘90’s and grows one of the oldest strains or cultivars of OG in Humboldt. That’s not exactly something you could come right out and say before a few years ago. Educating customers about where their cannabis came from, and the history behind it is a huge factor in explaining quality. Traditionally, the name of a cannabis strain was one of the only things you could go off of to determine quality. There were and still are waves of popularity for strains with “Skittles” or “Sherbert” in the title, but more or less, the cannabis probably wasn’t too different from one another, or it might be wildly different and it’s just named a certain way to get it to sell. For Woody Ridge, one cultivar he grows in particular, Durban Legend, is the grandmother of just about any OG in the marketplace. Genetically it is unique since it is one of the few cultivars which contains THCV. This cannabis flower has a 1:2 ratio of THCV:THC so around 7% — for context, the most I have ever seen before was around 1%. THCV is indicative of African strains so it’s a verifiable marker that this cultivar is indeed from Africa, more specifically the Durban coast if we’re going by the name. It’s products like this that challenge the idea that “all weed is the same” and introduce new and seasoned consumers to really high quality cannabis along with credible information. Now instead of falling into the name trap that we see in the cannabis industry, there is quantifiable data to say this cultivar is distinguished from another and then consumers can start to identify the qualities they like. Because when it comes down to it, it’s about personal preference, because of how the market has been managed before, there isn’t all that much differentiation between cannabis, but hopefully as more seasoned farmers are able to enter the game, we can see more diversification like what Woody Ridge offers.

I positioned Haikkuu as a design agency specific to one industry but also for top-tier products. I moved to the place that’s home to the best. That has to be shown in every touch point of the brand, meaning the brand, packaging, messaging, and marketing. Most recently, I expanded my business to include all other industries, but still focus on high-quality products and services as well as cannabis. I’m calling it The Stuudiio.

Do you think Humbolt has lost meaning because people are trying to siphon that reputation?

There is a lot going on in Humboldt, so the meaning it carries depends on who you ask. The Netflix documentary, Murder Mountain captured a part of it but it certainly isn’t the whole thing. It was an accurate look of essentially one cul-de-sac on Alderpoint which is a small community. On the other side, you have 50, 60 years of people coming to Humboldt for the cannabis scene that really lean into the metaphysical. Then, you’ve got a long legacy of timber, cattle, and fishing industries in the area as well. These are salty, blue collar workers who don’t buy into the whole hippie crystal stuff and yoga speak. So the reputation is multifaceted.

I think that the meaning Humboldt carries will become better defined as the market matures. Currently, there are groups who are working towards establishing appellation naming regulations around cannabis. These are based on appellation naming guidelines used in the wine industry in France and have stringent qualifications that determine how you can name and market a product. This codifies and protects a lot of the growing methodologies that the best-of-the-best have been using for a long time. Full sun. Full term. Spring fed. No fertilization. This way some company can’t say “sun-kissed” unless it really means something.

How do you feel about that? Is it simply about being from a specific mountainside or how it’s grown?

I think it’s a great tool for farmers to be able to make their own guidelines of what quality means. The proposed regulations were just released as to how it will all be determined, so it’s still being worked out, but essentially they need to get together with their neighbors, or individually and decide what qualities will define their appellation. That will go in front of a board to be approved and then it’s a matter of marketing the appellation and also enforcing appropriate use so it’s not bootlegged. It’s a lot on top of everything else they’re doing and is also around $25,000 to apply. My hope is that we will start to see the look and feel of the cannabis industry start to crystalize something that not only is high-quality but looks high-quality as well so we can close the gap which exists in how cannabis is visually represented.

When the creative playing field is so wide open. How do you appeal to an audience?

Through visual language — that’s how I base all my projects — from a very strategic marketing perspective. Asking “who, specifically, do you want to appeal to?” and then qualifying what that target demographic gravitates towards from a design perspective. In cannabis, I’ve tried to situate myself as high-quality and there’s a certain look that a customer would expect from that level of quality. It doesn’t mean ostentatious, but rather thoughtful and nuanced.

How do you do that?

Well, it’s about boiling down what people are visually drawn to through examples that already exist in the world. You could say design styles rather than visual language. My process comes from experience working in UX and UI and how you can influence someone based on design. We all have design styles that we are drawn to, so I think it’s important to define who you want to appeal to so you can better understand how to create a design that says “Hey, pick me up!”

So for my process, I have some branding exercises I do with clients at the beginning of the project. I’ll take them to the grocery store and say: “You have five minutes to buy whatever you want.” When they are finished, I’ll group the items together and point out the design qualities they are gravitating towards: like bold typeface or primary colors. Usually, during this process, it gives them the ability to put words to what they like. We all know what we like and dislike, but we might not have the design vocabulary to describe it. Using this same concept, we’ll create user personas for the brand that we are making and shop with them in mind to see the difference between our client’s personal taste and their intended audience. It’s a great tool to get them out of their own biases and think empathetically as well as build a design vocabulary so we can better communicate through the design process.

How much of a client’s taste matters?

Usually I fire clients who want to make a vanity project. I would probably make more money if I didn’t but it’s what I need to do to sleep at night.

It’s nice to help a client make something for someone else. But sometimes they are going to be their best customer. And if they are, then their taste does matter. The idea is, ultimately, you want to sell to other people. That can be really hard though because 90% of my potential cannabis clients are men and they want to feel represented by their brand. One of the partners of a past client hated the redesign we did for them. Thankfully his wife was really behind the change. Fast forward a few years and they are now selling at Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Anthropology and a handful of other big-box retailers. They have been featured in Forbes, Vogue and recognised all over the industry for their high-brow design. It wasn’t until we put the new design on a flat brimmed hat that the husband came around. Or perhaps he liked how much they were selling.

So what are your hopes for the cannabis space?

One of my hopes for the cannabis industry is sane legislation. Fundamentally we have to change the regulations to be reasonable and in California that is going to take voter initiated legislation or new federal guidelines to supersede state rules.

Ultimately cannabis is a plant, we don’t have to regulate it like hazardous waste. It all comes down to education — the more educated we can be about cannabis, the more we will understand it and the better we can manage it. There are so many possibilities for new products, genetic development, medicinal and therapeutic uses, new businesses, tourism, the list goes on, but as it stands now, the legislation doesn’t allow for anyone but multi-million dollar backed players to be in the legal space. My dream is to be able to go to a mom and pop coffee shop, read a book and smoke an herbal spliff in a place that is bright with lots of plants and a comfy chair.

You and me both.

The Stuudiio represents creatives as well as offers design services such as photography, graphic design, marketing campaigns, infographic design and more. I’s and U’s are better as twos, so let’s get together and make it happen. Learn more about The Stuudiio at thestuudiio.com