Greg Meade and Davante Rowe
Following a wave of legalization across the country, the cannabis industry has been experiencing a profitable boom, much to the benefit of those detached from the community, but when it comes to innovation on the 420 eCommerce front, The King Brand and Novlte founders Greg Meade and Davante Rowe, aren’t your usual cannabis company suspects. One is a law school graduate, the other a college dropout, but together, they are owners of two multimillion-dollar companies specializing in cannabis smoking accessories.
The conceptual origin of The King Brand came how much great ideas do, during a vacation. During a trip to his second home in Jamaica, Rowe noted an abundance of sugarcane reserves were going to waste that could also be used as a tobacco alternative. But no idea is without obstacle. After roughly a year of petitioning for the approval of the United States Department of Agriculture and the Jamaica’s Ministry of Agriculture to import/export sugarcane, given the potentially hazardous nature of sugarcane contaminated with foreign pests, the duo was finally in the clear with the appropriate government agencies.
During that time, they created partnerships with sugarcane farmers in Jamaica where Rowe’s father resides. The effort required them to develop a mastery of international relations; creating relationships with Jamaica’s Ministry of Agriculture and the USDA in order to make efficient their imports and exports of sugarcane-based shisha.
The idea was simple, supplement tobacco with sugarcane for sugarcane-based shisha, the execution was not.
Rowe and Meade maneuvered a fairly complex sales landscape with clients consisting largely of small lounges and restaurants. Because their funds were limited to contributions from friends and family, processing orders and fulfillment proved to be a hassle. For hours, the duo, along with the help of their longtime business associate John Mercier, mixed shisha by hand and fulfilled orders in the basement of Meade’s childhood home.
After a handful of road trips across the United States promoting the product, spending every dollar in their respective names, they had to face a simple fact: the current business model simply wasn’t working. They needed to take a step back and re-assess. After bouncing back from the hard lesson of failure, the team came back and created the product that would change the landscape of their business, aptly named, The King Enhancer, a nod to the brand’s second coming and the profitable export: the world’s only product that increases smoke duration by up to five times. Rowe and Meade hit the ground running. With the help of OVO’s Roy Wood’s catchy track, they produced a video demonstrating the product’s ability to slow burn time that went viral instantly.
After nearly a year of steady success, The King Brand founders shifted their focus to establish their second 420 company: Glunt. Glunt, a play on the words “glass” and “blunt” is a unique glass piece that allows users to indulge in their 420 activities without dealing with the potentially negative effects of tobacco.
The success of the business and understanding of the industry was the inspiration behind Rowe enrolling and eventually graduating from Notre Dame Law School. When we sat down to chat, the pair said they knew they would be facing a number of legal challenges faced by the tobacco and 420 industries, and they wanted to be prepared. Rowe graduated in May 2017 and Meade dropped out of college in 2017.
Among their many ambitious goals is to create a cult-like following, turning customer needs into products, and thus making them unofficial brand ambassadors who share their experience. We caught up with the pair to talk brand growth, the stigmas of the cannabis industry and their future plans.
How do you manage the business process and communicate with your customers?
Meade: We do a lot online using Shopify as our main eCommerce outlet. That enables us to track analytics, including how many sales we get per day and where those sales originate.
To keep in touch with customers, we utilize Mailchimp, a marketing automation platform. MailChimp really makes it easy to stay engaged with our customer base. Order fulfillment has been a challenge but maintaining a great relationship with our shipping carrier has been integral. We ship our goods out of the Willimantic Connecticut post office and the staff over there has done an amazing job at helping us streamline our fulfillment process!
Rowe: Because of the restrictions of social media platforms when it comes to marketing tobacco and 420 related products, we’re working on building a community of influencers. If you see your favorite artist or social media celebrity enjoying the product organically, it has a much greater impact.
What are the most challenging feats you’ve had to overcome as not only eCommerce entrepreneurs but as 420 eComm entrepreneurs?
Meade: There are so many! We road tripped for two weeks straight and slept in a 1993 Ford Taurus to get the word out about our product. That may not have been the hardest thing to overcome, but it was sure as hell was the most tiring! Then there’s having to fulfill thousands of customer orders in a timely fashion after a sales spike.
Rowe: There are tons of feats we had to overcome, but we don’t spend too much time dwelling on it once we’re passed it. We dip our head low, and go in for the next challenge. I would advise incoming entrepreneurs to be persistent and remain inquisitive. You can get very far just by asking questions and doing your homework. Sometimes, it’s really that simple.
What are some of the advantages of investing in eComm over brick and mortar? Are there plans for a physical component in the future?
Meade: eCommerce enables you to target your market much more efficiently and it also has much lower startup costs than brick and mortar. eCommerce is the future of retail. There's so much more growth potential. I do not foresee us moving in the brick and mortar direction in the near future.
What sets you apart from the competitors playing in the 420 space?
Rowe: If the product isn't the first of its kind or something that hasn't been brought to market, we generally try to stay away from it. For example, we could have done hemp papers since that's what's hot on the market right now but we wanted to do something unique of our own. Something that makes people say "Hey, this company sells something no one else is selling at the moment." There are people out there that have tried using corn husk as papers but we are one of the pioneers in commercializing it. If someone wants flavored corn husk papers to smoke with, they come to us.
I also think there is something to be said about two young men capitalizing off of the 420 boom.
Rowe: Like many black people in America, I come from a family dealt first hand with the atrocities of the war on drugs. My dad, a Jamaican immigrant, was imprisoned in ’91, the year before I was born and eventually deported, for allegedly conspiring to traffic narcotics. A family was torn apart because of an agenda to keep black men criminalized under the guise of a war on drugs. Fast forward 25 years and we are now celebrating the very drugs so many innocent, and guilty black men have been incarcerated over. As a black man, I take pride in being able to benefit from this new movement rather than be another victim of it.
Where do you get your drive?
Meade: I’ve worked a few part-time jobs and told myself I’ll never work for someone else again. Working on your own time is better than someone else’s 9-5. Building our companies each day sort of feels like a video game, just in real life.
Davante, are you choosing becoming an entrepreneur over being a lawyer?
Rowe: Well the good news is that once I pass the bar, I have technically chosen to be both. But to answer your question I would definitely have to say my parents and grandmother inspired me to prioritize entrepreneurship over practicing law at a firm. It wasn’t so much their direct words of encouragement as it was experiencing their struggle and the obstacles they had to overcome in getting where they are in life. From the beginning, business was always my passion because I saw it as the epitome of taking control over your own destiny.
Many thanks to Greg Meade and Davante Rowe, for their time, insight, an example of what it means to take your own craft and create an empire. Keep an eye on them and their respective brands.