Hudson Cannabis

A wordmark built to sit closer to a farm than a dispensary. Wide-tracked and unadorned, paired with a high-contrast display serif that carried the campaign voice. The system had to hold two registers at once — the credibility of the growing operation and the wit of the consumer work — without either undercutting the other.

Federal scheduling puts organic certification out of reach for cannabis, so the vocabulary had to do the work the word would have: living soil, sun-grown, hand-trimmed. Precise, verifiable, and none of it a claim we couldn't defend.

The moon system. New York required effect and potency on every package, but the industry's vocabulary — indica, sativa, hybrid — asks a new consumer to learn a taxonomy before they can buy. The system needed something readable at arm's length that didn't make a claim.

The answer came from the farm. The cultivation team was already working in biodynamics, planting and harvesting against the lunar calendar: full moon for top growth, new moon for roots. The same arc mapped onto the effect scale consumers were being asked to navigate — expansive at full, restorative at new. A moon dial gave the brand an indicator that was instantly legible, connotative without being a promise, and rooted in how the plants were actually grown.

It scaled everywhere: effect badges on flower, vape, and RSO; the sticker system; the icon set; and its own campaign in "Once in a (Super) Blue Moon."

Wordmark, stacked

Moon phase icon set — five states

Purple Unicorn indica sticker

Effect badge on vape

Effect badge on RSO

Once in a (Super) Blue Moon campaign

One dial, every surface — wayfinding, compliance, and voice from a single mark.

→ Moon phase study (Phase 2)

Hudson Cannabis was on shelf at New York's first legal dispensary the day it opened, in December 2022. Wholesale orders started arriving in the new year, and that's where the role changed.

Once product was moving, the coordination surface grew fast. Every cycle meant new strains, materials, and formulas; new packaging and lot-specific compliance stickers; wholesale menu updates with pricing and product information; in-store assets and visual merchandising; launch campaigns across digital and social. Any one of those slipping put the others out of sync.

Nobody was holding all of it at once, so I built the system that did — and ended up owning the calls it produced: which products, strains, and blends the raw material went into, what they were called, and when they launched.

The system ran at three speeds. The annual roadmap set direction. The quarterly plan set capacity. The weekly loop set the menu. Leadership surfaced the openings — investor relationships, brand partnerships, access to new equipment and capital — and I built the roadmap against them.

The filters. Every release cleared three tests at once. Was there a gap in the competitive landscape? Could the farm make it at quality and volume? Did it extend the brand story rather than dilute it? New categories launched small — enough product to test appetite while the team learned the workflow. We committed and scaled only when demand and internal capacity both proved out.

The weekly loop. Fridays, Ezra and I would assess available material and pull samples to test over the weekend. Monday we'd decide what would hit the menu that Friday. I'd sprint the rest of the week on strain and product descriptions, positioning, packaging labels, and content — all of it landing on the wholesale menu Friday afternoon, where buyers had learned to check for what was new. Email, social, and web followed the menu.

Naming, copy, label, and campaign moved in a single week because product development, brand, and marketing weren't separate handoffs. Most brands can't run that loop. We could because the constraint — you can only sell what the harvest gave you — was designed into the process instead of fought against.

NEEDED: label applicator or packaging line — silent loop, ~5s

The annual roadmap set direction. The quarterly plan set capacity. The weekly loop set the menu.

Coordination. Running that cadence meant the departments had to move together. Alongside the creative work, I spent time with operations building the practices that let cultivation, processing, sales, and marketing plan against each other rather than in sequence.

Four products went to market in New York before anyone else's: Dimes, Ounces, Moonwalkers, and Hash Coins. The roadmap was built to find those gaps.

Flower — Dimes (first to market), Eighths, Quarters, Ounces (first to market), Grounds, Kief-Infused Grounds, Moon Rocks

Prerolls — Joints, 7-Packs, Moonwalkers (first to market), Hash-Infused Packs

Concentrates — Hash Coins (first to market, #1 best-seller), Cured Rosin, RSO, Solventless Diamonds

Vapes — Carts, Rosin-Infused, Liquid Diamond

Ounces launched when the business needed working capital — a volume SKU to bridge cashflow. Not a creative decision, but the creative team was where the call got made.

I ran naming across products, strains, and blends. Genetics we inherited kept their original names and we printed them on the package — the same transparency a produce label gives you when it names the varietal. Blend names I developed against three constraints at once: what consumers were asking for, what the harvest could actually supply, and what the brand could credibly say.

The closed loop. Whole-plant thinking started as an extension of the farm's regenerative practice — the same logic that governs soil applied to material. Craft beer, single-origin coffee, natural wine had all built categories on process transparency and graded output. Cannabis hadn't.

It became literal once I understood the full process from seed to finished product. Solventless static sift hash was made from the byproduct of our own flower: high-margin product from material most operators discount. Every grade of the harvest had a destination.

The clearest version came from teaching budtenders at the farm. Papa Smurf hash arrived three to six months after Papa Smurf flower — same strain, same field, later in the process, because processing and curing take the time they take. People rallied around that. And the flower had already earned enough trust that they believed in the hash before they tried it.

Committing to solventless — common in Europe, still rare in the US — meant the entire concentrate line was categorically differentiated, straight through to pure solventless THCA diamonds. It also meant the products carried the values on their own. Someone with no time for the farm story still got a differentiated product in their hand.

RSO. The category was sold in syringes — a format that reads clinical and asks a first-time buyer to dose an unfamiliar full-spectrum concentrate out of an unmarked plunger. Wrong for our customer, wrong for a brand built to sit next to produce.

We became the first brand to bring a newly patented dispenser to market instead. It made RSO measurable, portable, and approachable, and opened the product to people the syringe had been turning away. Once it proved out, we negotiated exclusivity on the dispenser — protecting a ready-to-use RSO category we had effectively created.

Solventless sift screen in operation — silent loop, ~5s

Static sift hash, made from the byproduct of our own flower.

Hash Coins, product

Solventless Static Hash campaign

New York's No.1 Best Selling Hash campaign

Moon Rocks / Moonwalkers

Solventless THCA Diamonds

High-margin product from the material most operators discount.

Divine Invention — RSO campaign

RSO dispenser, product detail

The category was sold in syringes. We brought the first patented dispenser to market, then took exclusivity on it.

Digital was the bridge — the discipline I came in with, and the one that turned out to be the connective tissue between the farm and the market. Not a campaign calendar: a system built to publish at the speed the harvest moved.

Voice. Cannabis marketing runs tired. The work jumped off the expected into something slightly adjacent — terpene wordplay for people who knew what limonene was, a diesel line timed to marathon weekend, effect language built on lunar phase. New York culture and weed culture both reward the same instinct: real ones know. The writing was built for the people who knew, and it flattered them for knowing.

I wrote all of it. Copy wasn't a separate discipline handed off after design; the pun and the layout were conceived together, which is why the campaigns hold across formats.

Content. Brand imagery came from the farm on the farm's schedule — harvest happens once a year and doesn't wait for a production calendar. Seasonal shoots with Adam Whyte (product campaigns, farm documentation), Todd Midler (processing, harvest, team interviews), and Meredith Jenks (NYC Diesel drop) built a library covering growing, processing, people, and product. The brand never had to reach for stock or borrow a look it hadn't earned.

What I didn't produce directly got templated, so a small team could work against the system without a designer in the loop for every asset. That was deliberate: my time went to strategy with the CEO, the product roadmap, and helping operations build coordination across departments.

When Life Gives You (Limonene)

Real Magic — vape campaign

Sweet Dreams (Cherry) — CBN vape

Terpene wordplay for people who knew what limonene was.

New York Runs On Diesel — NYC Diesel drop

Farm documentation, harvest

Timed to marathon weekend. Photography by Adam Whyte, Todd Midler, and Meredith Jenks.

Federal illegality blocks most conventional marketing. Paid promotion is unavailable, posts get auto-flagged for the product itself, and accounts disappear. The person behind the counter is the channel.

So we built that channel. I pushed for and developed a budtender education program: our sales team trained every new dispensary that took on the product and returned seasonally with new strains, vocabulary, and process methods. We hosted 5–10 farm tours a year, up to 50 guests each — roughly a thousand budtenders over three years, many of whom had never been to a farm, let alone a cannabis farm.

Budtenders under the greenhouse, harvest season

Roughly a thousand came through the farm. Many had never been to one.

By 2025 the product was in 200–250 dispensaries. Instagram reached 20,000 followers, built entirely organically in a system designed to remove us.

Tour in progress — greenhouse rows, lav mic, group listening

Budtenders in the field, fall foliage

"I'd rather be pheno-hunting" hat, worn on the tour

Seasonal re-training on new strains, vocabulary, and process.

At Revelry in Hudson and New York, the booth put the brand in front of the trade directly — plywood, pegboard, product at hand, built to look like the farm store rather than a trade booth.

Merch did the rest. J.R. Smith kept the "I'd rather be pheno-hunting" hat on through the show.

Revelry booth — plywood, pegboard, product at hand

"I'd rather be pheno-hunting" hat and camo jacket, product shot

Team at the booth

Built to look like the farm store, not a trade booth.