Trend Alert: Designer Cannabis Cones

Trend Alert: Designer Cannabis Cones 

For those new to the cannabis scene, a cannabis cone is a pre-rolled marijuana cigarette that starts thin but widens as you go up to the top of the joint and usually has a filter to counteract harshness.

Joints require rolling, and often a newbie in particular, or someone with limited dexterity such as wounded ex-vets or those with Parkinson's disease, find the entire cannabis experience more pleasant when everything is prerolled. 

Note that with a cannabis cone, you still need to add the marijuana of your choice, but as the entire legal cannabis market is about branding, it makes perfect sense to offer cannabis cones with your custom branding. 

Note that you can buy a wide variety of cones, even on Amazon, for a general cost of around 30 cents each, and you can even buy cones made of hemp online.

However, big money is in combining designer cones pre-filled with cannabis.

Also called pre-rolled, in many legal dispensaries, you can buy a pack of 1 gram pre-rolled cones with marijuana included for around $50 for a pack of 5. 

Packaging, reputation, and a clever name matter as much in the cannabis business as in the liquor business. 

Alcohol distributors have long learned that by packing their alcoholic drinks in a fancy bottle and coming up with a great cover story about how their brand is produced, they can capture a significant percentage of the market. Still, they can charge significantly more per ounce for their product.

Similarly, many cannabis companies have a reputation for pre-rolled cannabis, which may have a name like Shiva Thunder (not a genuine brand, by the way).

 They are cultivated on the Ganges river banks and blessed by God when they come from some lowly plot of land in rural Oregon produced by a couple of burnt-out hipsters from the 60s. 

If you want proof that to most cannabis consumers, what matters to them is the amount of THC content and the price, look no further than Forbes magazine.

In June 2020, they published an article titled, "Science Reveals The Cannabis Industry's Greatest Lie: You're Buying Weed Wrong (And So Is Everyone Else)."

You can read it for yourself by looking up the title on Google. Still, the gist of the article is that scientists have proved that THC content has very little to do with how high you get from the marijuana (except for edibles.)

So buying a premium weed with 24 percent THC levels compared to buying is no benefit whatsoever, over buying cannabis with 12 or 16 percent THC.

But people will willingly pay the price to buy a Hawaiian strain with 22 percent THC, assuming it's better, over the Little Old Lady from Pasadena Brand (again, not a genuine brand) because they think the cannabis will be better.

So what does this have to do with designer cones?

Well, it proves that in the cannabis industry, perception is still king, particularly since many of the buyers of legal cannabis haven't been educated fully about the art of buying cannabis. 

And owning to the industry as a whole, which is barely legal and highly regulated in all the states that have legalized it, there are no "Cannabis Tasting Clubs" like there are with wines and spirits, and as many legal dispensaries hire fellow stoners

who has no credentials in the business other than smoke it themselves? 

When a new or returning customer goes into a shop and buys a brand of marijuana, they may get 5 minutes or less of Stoner Bob's time at the register to make their selection.

The chances are that Stoner Bob, who makes $10 an hour and mostly spends his off-time producing God-awful guitar music in some heavy metal band, knows less about 

marijuana than his customers. 

Also, many dispensaries are owned by owners attracted to running a weed shop, and many are highly inefficient and barely make ends meet.

In fact, in recent years, there has been so much illegal marijuana flooding the market that total supply may have outstripped demand by as much as 300 percent.

There are dozens of articles on the internet showing that small, mom and pop investors in selling cannabis are slowly being pushed out of the market by large, well

funded conglomerates, many of those coming from liquor companies investing in the cannabis industry to expand their market.

This brings us back to designer cannabis cones. 

One way that smaller and independent growers can distinguish themselves is to use the premium marketing strategy of the alcohol industry and offer designer, labeled products.

And designer cannabis cones are a relatively cheap way to do this. Not only are designer cannabis cones distinctive, costing around 11 cents per cone or less, but

as a result of providing a pre-rolled cannabis product, dispensaries can quickly double the price of their product by offering a pack of pre-rolled designer cones at around $50 for a pack of 5. 

Another advantage of packaging cannabis pre-rolled cones is that it encourages more excellent buying than consumers just buying a single gram or a lid, which has around 3.5 grams.

The vast majority of designer cannabis cones are sold in packs of 5, which means the consumer gets 5 grams of your product at a time.

So it's easy to imagine that a package of 5 fully-branded designer cones can increase sales.

This means that you not only have a friendly, well-designed, and inviting package to sell your cannabis with, but for most, each pre-rolled cannabis cone has around a 3 inch, branded, and printed cone at the smaller end a cone.

Going back to our previous fictional Shiva Brand, if there was small artwork of

With Shiva sitting on a tiger's skin, consumers will undoubtedly remember your brand.

So the artwork at the bottom of a pre-rolled makes cannabis cones unique.

One customer cone maker says there are four steps to designing a pre-rolled, custom cone.

Step one is choosing the type of paper, such as plain white, brown, or hemp rolling papers.

Step two is choosing the filter length, which regulates the smoking experience.

The next step is choosing a design style, such as a simple logo, a double-sided design, or a multi-colored design, followed by the last step, which is customizing further by 

offering outer wraps will make a pre-rolled cannabis cone stand out as something fun and exciting. 

At around 15 cents or less for designer cannabis cones, they allow a smaller grower to compete with the big boys who can afford to spend millions on promoting their cannabis brand.

Of course, there is no profit margin in selling cannabis cones themselves, so a grower will also need a pre-roll machine to fill each cannabis cone with your quality (hopefully) premium cannabis.

You'll usually need to go to a separate printing company to get the packaging of your

pre-rolled cones are just right, but this is also a massive part of marketing.

There is plenty of room for a graphic artist or illustrator to make a stunning package with a cigarette-style package.

Essentially then, pre-rolled designer cannabis cones are the artistic bottles of the liquor industry. They attract attention to your brand and give people a brand name to remember.