Project: Re-define the cannabis retail experience.

Background:
As a vertically-integrated company, NorCal Cannabis Co.’s goal is to win the CA market with cultivation, manufacturing, production, product brands, delivery and retail. In 2019, we developed a strategy that would differentiate our retail portfolio, appeal to all consumer segments and scale across the state. The first brand we created became Herb & Legend, an experiential retail concept.

Concept: Experiential Cannabis Destinations

Role: Head of Design
Research, Brand strategy, creative direction, retail design

Additional Team:
Voice: Jessea Hankins
Content Strategy: Daisy Barringer
Art Director: Kevin Peth
Web Design: Play Studio
Interior Design: Janel Holiday
Exterior Design: LMNOP Inc.

Timeline: 10 months

Audience

The Global Citizen
”We believe in the power of stories. Stories, our own and of notorious people and places, are part of our collective consciousness.”

Cosmopolitan tourists and neighborhood residents who delight in bespoke shopping and entertainment experiences and span the cannabis experience spectrum (prospect to legacy). They value high-quality products, wellness, travel, the arts, environmental stewardship, and community, and seek out experiences that are novel, captivating, and culturally enriching. They believe in the power of stories as a way to connect with others and inspire creativity and change.

Brand

Brand Mark
Intended to captivate and delight people before they enter a store, be memorable with the promise of meaning and trustworthiness, while feeling playful and unexpected. It illustrates “herb” and “legend” in the way the words connect and grow together like a plant, while still expressing enchanted, storybook elements.

Brand Personality
We’re mystic pixie dream girls and boys (like manic pixies without all the baggage). We’ve been out in the desert meditating but we stopped for In-N-Out on the way back. We’re of the moment but hold in our soul the whole history of California, of generations and generations of misfits and dreamers, skaters and punks. We’re lovers of stories and might drop references to urban legends and ancient myths, to local poetry from beat to hip hop, from King Arthur and the Loch Ness monster to Joan Didion and back again (by way of the Goonies). We’re high and highbrow and lowbrow all at once. We have an air of mystery but we’re easy to be friends with. We’d like to welcome you in, offer you a cup of tea, and share a tale, a toke, and a treasure map.

Brand Design Principles

1. Luminous

2. Imaginative

3. Unexpected

4. Trusted

5. Curated

6. Charismatic

7. Natural

8. Cultural

Visual Brand Language

• Typography: Elegant, whimsical, modern.

• Colors: Classic, regal, sophisticated, positive, spiritual, calming.

• 3D Illustrations: Tell stories distinct to our store locations. Semi-realistic reminiscent of a dream-like environment.

• 2D Illustrations: Universal brand elements.

• Animations: Captivate and delight.

Herb
Herb refers to all medicinal plants, but specifically the cannabis plant and its multitude of uses.

• Medical treatment

• Enhancing experiences

• Wellness

• Escape and relaxation

• Cultural

• Spiritual

Website

Store Design

Principles

• Impressionable - Beyond the ordinary for memorable experiences.

• Cultured - Designed with local history and lifestyle, while always tying back to cannabis culture.

• Supportive - Always informative with contextual education and a knowledgeable staff.

• Variety - Diversified experience and inventory.

• Trusting - Layout supports the confidence we have in our customers.

• Easy - Intuitive layout and for increase in speed of purchase.

• Natural - Use of natural materials highlight the relationship to agriculture.

• Harmonious - Balance through complementary materials, gender neutrality and cultural variety.

• Human - Connection with empathetic communication, personal stories and events.

Store Concept A: The Modern Botanist
Manifesto:
Where the land bears fruit, where the sun is unimpeded outside of the redwood groves, the grasses brown against the hills, where the Miwok people say Coyote perched when he decided to make the world. Where Burbank created a kind of botanical Eden, conjured peaches, plums, pears. The mouth waters. Where Ripley dared us to believe it or not, and we chose to believe. Just south of the Emerald Triangle where the cannabis plant thrives, we too bloom here, ducking in and out of shade like hawks, coaxed by the daily dance of sun and night. A green rush of courage heartens generations of farmers to entice a new kind of magic from a fantastical herb. This place’s legends stroll hand in hand with paradigm shifts and determined tendrils of grapevine, with rumored hauntings and musical ghosts that send notes sparking toward the sky.

Legends influencing store design:

• Luther Burbank

• Christo

• Alfred Hitchcock

• Coastal Miwok (Legends of Sonoma Mountain)

• Safari West

Store Concept B: The North Beach Social Club
Manifesto:
North Beach, a storied neighborhood in the city of myth, where shrines to saints were built on Barbary Coast rubble, iniquity and transcendence mingling like the scents of espresso and garlic, like foghorns and Fernet. Invented and reinvented, gold rush city, beatnik city, city with bridges disappearing into fog, a streak of international orange shifting in and out of view. This is our home, this fabled place. Local legends twist through us like the tunnels that run beneath our feet, as do the pulse of the tides and the underwater palette of greens, blues, and shimmery flecks of sun in the vast Pacific (and the creatures that may dwell there). There is a world of magic that exists underneath our world that cannabis helps us see. There is a San Francisco, too, that lives beneath the tourist-friendly version, one that’s far more enigmatic, alluring, and fascinating. Herb & Legend welcomes you in, opens your eyes, spins you around, and sends you back out into mythic North Beach—pondering parrots, pirates, or maybe just pizza.

Legends influencing store design:

• Jack Kerouac and Beatniks

• The Bay and the Marin Headlands: gateway to the Pacific

• Fisherman’s Wharf

• The Kraken and Moby Dick

• Karl The Fog

• Gold Rush

• Dungeness crab, oysters, chanterelle mushrooms

The Herb & Legend brand and stores are still under development. The store concepts are evolving to be more refined and the first stores are scheduled to be opened in 2020.

Key Learnings:

• Cannabis a very capable plant which appeals to a very wide audience. Creating an experience that is differentiating, but inclusive requires a multi-brand or location-appropriate solution.

• Retail is omnichannel and so preparing for store openings requires cross-functional collaboration across a diverse set of skills including tech, merchandising, operations, branding, construction, design.

• Education is paramount to the cannabis retail experience and having a strategy that is set up for immediate learning is key.

• Scalability requires the right partnerships with parallel experience: architects, fabricators, designers, managers, programming, project management.

• Lab stores are necessary to test in real life before investing in fabrication and build.

• A learning and development plan is necessary for the staff, and therefore the store, to be successful.