High and Seek: Pure Beauty co-founder Imelda Walavalkar calls her brand “unabashedly recreational.”
Maggie Shannon
Endorsed by Timbaland and Nas, Imelda Walavalkar’s Los Angeles-based cannabis brand leans toward the joy of getting high and having fun.
In 2017, three friends from New York moved to Los Angeles to reinvent the cigarette. But the kind of cigars that Imelda Walavalkar, her husband Tracy Anderson, and art director Irwin Matutina wanted to make would not contain tobacco, only marijuana.
“Personally, I think it’s an iconic form factor,” says Anderson, who helped launch Bob Marley’s cannabis brand, Marley Natural. “The cigarette, it’s beautiful.”
The three soon founded Pure Beauty, a boutique cannabis brand that specializes in high-end, environmentally friendly cultivated weed that is rolled into marijuana cigarettes, complete with a wood-pulp filter. Currently, its best-selling product is a box of pre-rolled mini joints that the company affectionately refers to as “Babies.”
The cannabis legalization movement owes its growth (37 states now allow some form of legal sale) to medical marijuana. But for Walavalkar, Anderson and Matutina, they felt there weren’t enough brands that were just trying to have fun and get people high. Many cannabis entrepreneurs often cite deeply personal stories about how marijuana helped a loved one fight an illness, while others have virtuous narratives about wanting to heal the world with a plant bestowed by the gods. But for the founders of Pure Beauty, weed is all about relaxation.
“We are unashamedly recreational,” says Walavalkar. “It’s okay to want to get high just to get high.”
In many ways, Pure Beauty, which takes its name from the artist John Baldessari, is a typical startup. The brand launched in a South Central Los Angeles garage with a $30,000 cigarette-rolling machine and went through dozens of different types of paper, one that burned too fast, one too slow, until they hit on a marijuana cigarette. that felt and smoked perfectly.
In its first year, Pure Beauty had about $200,000 in sales, most of which was fueled by Anderson, who drove around Los Angeles in the company’s minivan, selling pot jars and joint packs to dispensaries. But at the end of 2017, he landed his first big order: MedMen he wanted $100,000 worth of Pure Beauty cigarettes.
“For us, it was all hands on deck, working all day and all night, double shifts,” says Walavalkar, the company’s CEO. For two weeks, the founders formed a “help cadre” made up of dozens of friends of friends, fed them burritos and tacos, and worked day and night. Pure Beauty met the deadline, but realized it had to scale up: its initial operation would not be able to meet future demand.
Little Delights: The little pre-rolls known as babies are among Pure Beauty’s best sellers.
Michael Tyrone Delaney
During Hall of Flowers in 2019, a cannabis trade show in Santa Rosa, California, David Mars, an investor with New York-based White Owl Capital, came across the Pure Beauty booth. He was struck by its clean, minimalist design and intrigued by its sustainable farming methods. The brand’s 22,000-square-foot growing site in Sacramento is off-grid, generates electricity through microturbines, and features near-zero net water use: HVAC units and dehumidifiers draw moisture from the air to irrigate crops. floors.
Mars says he sees Pure Beauty as an “independent national brand” that has created a truly stylish and cool vibe. “I think they would fit into a portfolio at LVMH,” says Mars, who eventually invested in the company.
Pure Beauty has raised a total of $7 million from Gron Ventures, Subversive Capital, Ceres Group Holdings, White Owl, all cannabis investors, and has also had musicians Timbaland and Nas open their wallets.
In 2020, the company generated what Forbes estimates to be around $20 million in revenue and last year, Pure Beauty brought in $44 million. The California-based company has now expanded into Michigan, through a deal with Gage, which has about a dozen dispensaries in the state.
At Cornerstone Wellness, a 15-year-old cannabis store in Los Angeles, Pure Beauty products don’t stay on shelves for long. “I think very few brands hit the mark: a really well-designed package, an eco-conscious brand, owned by a woman and a cutting-edge company; it’s refreshing,” says Erica Kay, founder of Cornerstone Wellness. “Their pre-rolls have been a great product for years and they are always selling out. You can’t stay long enough.
Pure Beauty also makes a THC “booster” drink called Little Strong Drink, or LSD for short. The 2-ounce bottle contains 100mg of THC from live resin from high-quality buds and is made with Concord grapes, cardamom, Egyptian hibiscus, and Ashwagandha grown in India.
Cannabis beverages currently account for about 1% of the $25 billion in legal cannabis sales last year, but Big Alcohol is moving quickly into the space. (Boston Beer Co. is launching a THC-infused iced tea in Canada.) For Walavalkar, who certainly “loves weed,” the drinks are a way to bring a session to the family’s backyard without the stigma of smoking.
“My parents don’t smoke a joint, but they do have a drink,” says Walavalkar. “The drinking ceremony is still ingrained in our culture. If you’re at a barbecue, there’s no ceremony around handing out a jelly bean to everyone. The drink doesn’t have that stigma. [like a joint] and anyone can participate that way.”
For now, Pure Beauty remains a small boutique brand, but the founders have successfully tapped into a cool factor reminiscent of Beboe, which was sold to cannabis giant Green Thumb Industries for $80 million in 2019. In an industry that is Increasingly dominated by corporate brands, Pure Beauty is a repudiation of market-research-driven products developed through a series of focus groups, says Anderson.
“We throw it all away and follow our intuition,” says Anderson. “We’re doing it from a true sense of ourselves, the art, the culture and the things that really matter to us.”
Walavalkar believes that many companies justify the use of cannabis by focusing too much on the medicinal benefits. For Pure Beauty, the strategy is to help destigmatize marijuana by admitting that getting high is fun. “The beauty of getting high is that it makes you happy, it gives you a shift in perspective, similar to art,” says Walavalkar. “That shift in perspective for me is a wellness thing, it’s more about the joy of getting high.”
Source: www.forbes.com