Luxury Weed Subscription Service Delivers The High Life
If you’ve been waiting for weed-infused bath bombs, 24k gold rolling papers or cannabis popcorn brought to your door, fortune is on your side. A new company launching in San Francisco will deliver all that and more starting in November.
Au Box, the brainchild of former Miss Iowa and model Jessica VerSteeg, is a medical cannabis subscription service that delivers luxury products in an discreet box to medical marijuana card-holders in San Francisco. Customers can choose from a selection of seven themed boxes starting at $99 a month, all of which feature a rotating selection of highly curated goods, from candles to pre-rolled joints to breath mints. The majority of the products are made by other Bay Area companies and are the cream of the crop of the high-end cannabis world.
“I wanted to make [cannabis] a nicer looking thing and take away the stoner stigma,” VerSteeg said. “So I tried to put a glamorous spin on it.”
VerSteeg didn’t plan on becoming an advocate for medical marijuana. Growing up in Iowa, she had pretty strong views on the substance. So much so that when her then-boyfriend, an NFL player, wanted to use medical marijuana for pain management, she said “absolutely not.”
“I said, ‘You can’t risk your job. And I’m Miss Iowa — I can’t have such a bad drug associated with my name.'” she said. “I fell into the stigma of marijuana being a dangerous drug and just a stoner thing.”
A few years later, after a long struggle with addiction to pain killers, the NFL player died from an overdose.
“I thought, ‘What could have changed? What could I have done differently?’ I could have just said ‘OK, smoke. And if you lose your career over it, it’s OK,” VerSteeg said. “Nobody dies from an overdose of cannabis. People are constantly dying of overdoses of painkillers.”
VerSteeg said she decided to dedicate her life to medical marijuana advocacy, and decided to do so by changing its image from seedy and dangerous to glitzy and glamorous.
VerSteeg has self-funded Au Box and joined forces with middle school friend and industry expert Rusty Deatherage to launch the company. As of now, the two are doing everything from selecting the products, wrapping the boxes and making their way through the legal minefield.
“The laws have been tiresome to work through,” she said.
Launching a cannabis business poses numerous challenges: From website compliance to testing the products to shipping with specific carriers. But despite the difficulties, the industry is poised to explode. Currently a $7 billion industry in the U.S., many predict the cannabis market will grow to a whopping $21.8 billion by 2020. Big business has taken note: Microsoft recently partnered with Los Angeles-based startup Kind to create software that tracks marijuana plants from seed to sale, and Peter Thiel recently invested in Leafly.com, the “Yelp of weed.”
For now, VerSteeg plans to take a modest hit off that growth. She expects the company to double every quarter and will launch a product ordering page in a couple months, which will allow customers to order any one product on its own without a subscription. To offer this nationally, however, Au Box can only sell CBD products this way, which do not contain THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.
After that, VerSteeg hopes to expand to every legalized state, or at least five of them, in the next five years.
“In ten years, I’d love to see myself as the ‘Neiman Marcus of cannabis,'” she said. “We pick the best of the best and I want everyone to have that luxury.”
Source: San Francisco Business Times, Tessa Love
Photo: When Jessica VerSteeg became an advocate for medical marijuana, she wanted to change the stoner stigma, opting to make cannabis glamorous and luxurious.