Can a stoner-movie tie-in boost a cannabis brand’s bottom line? If your brand is L.A.-based Pure Beauty and the film is Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls” starring perennially blazed best buds Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat, the answer is decidedly yes.
Subscribe
“Surprisingly, that was the highest month of sativa pre-roll sales that we’ve had in a very long time,” co-founder and CEO Imelda Walavalkar told me at the Network B2B trade show yesterday.
Surprising, she explained, because the limited-edition box of 10 Pure Beauty sativa-strain babies (.35 grams each) was only stocked in five dispensary doors.
“And it sold faster and more than any other of our babies,” she added. “Which is interesting because we didn’t put a ton into marketing.”
The tiny joints in the squid-emblazoned box (the image is of the giant pink bioluminescent cephalopod that features prominently) don’t actually appear in the film, nor does any Pure Beauty product for that matter. That’s because, Walavalkar explained, the collab itself didn’t come together until after the film had wrapped.
“That was the highest month of sativa pre-roll sales that we’ve had in a very long time.” — Pure Beauty CEO Imelda Walavalkar
“We’d heard that Kristen Stewart and her wife [the film’s writer-director Dylan Meyer] were fans of the brand and that’s all we knew,” she said, “Then a mutual friend of ours, Heidi Bivens who was the costume designer on the movie — she also did costumes for “Euphoria” — she said ‘Oh, this movie’s coming out and they’d love to discuss doing something together. And so then we talked about it, and it just like came together very organically.’ So we talked about it and it just sort of came together and a few weeks later Dylan came to our office and we fired up the [Storz + Bickel] Volcano and tried three sativas — we all agreed it needed to be a sativa — and decided this was the best combo for the movie.”
It turns out that “The Wrong Girls” isn’t Pure Beauty’s first foray into silver-screen sativas either. Walavalkar pointed to the display case at the brand’s booth where, just above the “Wrong Girls” boxes were ones covered in raspberries, banana yellow snakes and “Blink Twice,” the title of the 2024 psychological thriller that marked the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz (who was also the film’s co-writer).
“We did a collaboration with Zoë Kravitz two or three years ago,” Walavalkar said, “And she’s amazing. She’s classy and beautiful, but she’s a stoner and she likes to celebrate and she’s goofy too. … I feel like if our brand was a person, it would be Zoë.”
Sounds like the perfect set-up to a “Wrong Girls” sequel to me — only instead of communicating telepathically with their cats (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen) Stewart and Shawkat get help from a box of Pure Beauty babies magically transformed into human form — as Kravitz.
If you don’t find the humor in that suggestion, I suggest you immediately sit down, fire up a Pure Beauty baby and start streaming “The Wrong Girls” straight away (it’s on Amazon Prime).
“The Right Girls”? Stranger things have happened.
High Adam is a reader-supported publication. Consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Subscribe
