Custom smoking accessories are the merchandise layer of the cannabis industry. Items like grinders, lighters, rolling trays, papers, storage units, and tools can be printed with a company’s logo and be sold wholesale as merchandise or given away as promotions at retail locations such as dispensaries, smoke shops, events, etc. This is a complete guide to all of the items within the custom smoking accessories catalog as well as typical program structures.
The core catalog
We start with the items people use on a daily basis. At the high-end of grinders, we carry some really nice premium aluminum grinders. Then at the lower end of grinders, we have some really cool and unique zinc grinders that can sit on someone’s coffee table. Our lighters are a volume item, very cheap, we even give them away from time to time. They get borrowed all the time so we figure it’s easier to give them away and have someone buy another one. Rolling trays are display items. We carry papers that are consumable so people have to keep reordering. And lastly, we have ashtrays. These are the items that people keep at home and are an anchor for us in the home setting. Rather than us trying to carry 10 different versions of one item, we create a program around 1 item from each of these categories.
The extended catalog
The extended catalog consists of items that are specialty in nature including doob tubes & pre-roll packaging, stash jars & smell-proof containers, one hitters & dab tools, vaporizer batteries, apparel and stickers. These items allow for segmentation of customers into concentrate users, vapor first customers and travelers where each have a daily use item that can be branded. The extended catalog has the lowest minimums and would be a great place to begin to test a new program.
Three program structures
Typical Wholesale programs operate in 3 ways, Retail, Loyalty & Giveaway. The typical Retail program has a curated selection of branded products and are sold at margin to retail. The Loyalty program utilizes top tier merchandise as prizes to motivate the customer to reach tier levels without diluting product with discount. Lastly the Giveaway program is comprised of very small items (i.e. lighters, papers, grinder cards, etc.) that are awarded to the customer as they reach certain purchase levels. A mature retail dispensary typically runs all 3 programs off of 1 catalog with a singular colorway to appear cohesive across all product offerings.
Pricing and reorder rhythm
Most products are sold to retailers in wholesale quantities within tiered price structures. Typically the bigger price breaks are found in the hundreds for hard goods and lower thousand’s for consumables and matchbooks. It’s rare that it’s more cost effective to max out a single part number vs. having a variety of items in a reorder, as the retailer has a larger display and needs a decent offering of products. Our standard programs typically re-order every 4 months to allow time for initial sell-through data to come in.
How to start
To start a program you need a logo and a category. We create an adaptation of the artwork on all the articles you want to launch with. We deliver the proofs within a few days. Production time then varies from 2 to 5 weeks, depending on the article. We recommend starting with a 3 articles set (grinder, lighter and papers) to measure 90 days of movement on the counter and then scaling up what the counter proves.
Jump into the categories: grinders, lighters, trays, papers, ashtrays, and packaging — or read the deep-dives on lighters and papers.
