Shawn Gold says he's used cannabis throughout his career to enhance his creative abilities.
As the chief marketing officer at companies like Myspace, Lowell Herb Co., and TechStyle Fashion Group, Gold said he had to imagine new process systems and structures and think of creative solutions to complicated problems.
The way he did that, he said, was doing his homework and then using cannabis to help make nonlinear connections and rethink things from different perspectives.
"Cannabis has been a real aid in creative thinking for me," Gold said. Now, he's focused on building a "tool set" to help others do the same, he said.
Enter Pilgrim Soul, a cannabis lifestyle brand that Gold founded in 2019 to home in on what he says is the creativity enhancement that cannabis consumption can bring about.
The startup, which sells cannabis vapes in California and ancillary products like creative journals across the US, just raised a $2 million seed round from top cannabis investors like Merida Capital Holdings and Beehouse. Meaningful Partners and Michael Diamant, the founder of Skip Hop, also participated in the round.
A large chunk of the funds and revenue from sales, $1.2 million, will go toward Gold's area of expertise — marketing and advertising. About half a million dollars will go into cannabis inventory, while about $400,000 will go toward noncannabis inventory, according to Gold, who shared the startup's budget breakdown with Insider. The remaining dollars will be split among content and design and people.
The startup's first product on the market wasn't a cannabis product at all. It was a notebook called the Creative Thinking Journal, which encourages people to journal after they've used cannabis.
Gold told Insider he originally thought the journal would be a "breakeven giveaway thing" to gift to customers who bought the company's cannabis products. But the company rethought revenue plans amid the pandemic and wound up selling about $5.8 million worth of journals in 15 months. Today, it offers several varieties of journals and other stationary materials for cannabis consumers.
Those journals have become a prospective gold mine for Pilgrim Soul, which is hoping to be a national cannabis name.
Gold said there were 120,000 or so customers in his database who had bought the company's noncannabis products and opted in to receiving content from the brand.
He said that strategy would pay off as the company looked to license its products around the country.
"Part of the benefit of doing a licensing deal with us would be like, 'Here's 20,000 customers who like to get high and be creative in New York or in Michigan,'" he said. "Anybody who buys our journal is saying, 'I like to get high and be creative.' So they're already prequalified with our cannabis products."
Below are some of the key slides from Pilgrim's Soul's pitch deck.
Take a look at Pilgrim Soul's pitch deck below: