Weed Merch: How Cannabis Became a Streetwear Category

In August 2013 a rapper from San Francisco filed a trademark application for sweatshirts and T-shirts. The mark was Cookies SF. It registered in October 2014 in class 25, clothing, footwear and headgear.

That filing is the origin of modern weed merch, and it had almost nothing to do with fashion.

Why a weed brand registers a clothing trademark

Federal trademark protection requires lawful use in commerce, and the USPTO applies that literally. Its examination guidance states that use of a mark in commerce must be lawful under federal law to be the basis for federal registration, and that the office refuses marks for goods showing a clear violation of federal law regardless of their legality under state law.

So a cannabis company cannot protect its name on cannabis. Two dispensaries a few miles apart on the same street can both call themselves Cookies and neither has recourse.

Apparel is federally lawful. Register the name on sweatshirts and you own an enforceable federal mark, you can hang that mark over a dispensary door, and you can act against anyone trading on it. The registration is the receipt. Berner filed COOKIES SF in class 25, for sweatshirts and T-shirts, in August 2013, and it registered in October 2014 as number 4619692.

Trademark practice adds a second benefit. A registration in one class can block confusingly similar marks in adjacent classes under the zone of natural expansion, so a clothing registration protects more than clothing.

Where cannabis streetwear started

The aesthetic did not start with dispensaries. It started with skateboarding. HUF opened its first store in San Francisco in 2002, and the Plantlife sock, a weed leaf knitted into a crew sock, appeared around 2005 or 2006 from a concept by Hanni El Khatib. It flopped. Complex reported the founder's own account: it got a mention in a holiday gift guide and then sat there, and it would be years before the design really took off, around 2011 or 2012.

Nike SB released its first 4/20 Dunks in 2004, two years after the sub-brand launched, followed by the Skunk Dunk High in 2010 and a Cheech and Chong Dunk in 2011. Snoop Dogg and HUF released a 420 pack together in 2013, the same year the Cookies trademark was filed.

By the time cannabis companies needed apparel for legal reasons, stoner merch was a decade-old commercial category with proven demand, and the skate brands had already proved the graphic sells to people who do not smoke.

The traffic ran both ways. Strains started getting named the way sneakers are, after athletes and candy brands, arriving with cultural weight the plants had not yet earned. That is brand-building borrowed wholesale from streetwear, and it worked.

Cannabis apparel brands and the advertising problem

The second force is negative. Weed brands sell clothes partly because they are barred from most ways of selling weed. Google prohibits advertising marijuana along with pipes and bongs. Meta bars ads promoting the sale or use of illicit or recreational drugs. That removes the two channels every other consumer brand runs on.

The founder of a cannabis lifestyle magazine described the workaround to Fashionista in plain terms: it is a marketing play, a way to sell to people who are not buying weed, or to reach people who cannot. Operators run two accounts, one for products they can barely promote and one for merchandise they can.

State rules push the same direction while shaping what the merchandise can be. New York limits a licensee's branded apparel to adult sizes and permits its sale only at the licensee's own premises, which is why so much weed merch is a store-visit object or a limited drop rather than a wholesale line. California defines branded merchandise as a regulatory category, names clothing in it, and requires the license number to be permanently affixed and clearly visible from the outside of the item.

Read those together and a hoodie is doing three jobs at once:

• A trademark anchor, holding the federal mark the weed itself cannot carry
• An advertising channel, in a category barred from the ordinary ones
• A regulated object, with a license number printed inside the collar

One thing worth saying about the size of all this: nobody knows. There is no credible measurement of cannabis-branded apparel as a market. Figures do circulate, and the ones we could trace either measure hemp as a textile fiber, which is a completely different business, or come from sources with something to sell. The category is real, visible in every skate shop in America, and entirely unmeasured.

The cannabis fashion collab era

Once the mechanism was in place, the collaborations followed the ordinary logic of fashion.

M Missoni, the younger line of the Italian knitwear house Missoni, launched a cannabis collaboration with Pure Beauty in Los Angeles in February 2020, putting the house zigzag on a pre-roll. Aries and Pure Beauty followed in February 2022 with an apparel capsule and a custom strain called Gateway, developed jointly by the two founders.

Edie Parker, an accessories label, went the other way and launched Flower by Edie Parker in 2019, selling stash jars, lighters, ashtrays and rolling trays priced from twenty dollars to five hundred. Sundae School built a streetwear brand around cannabis and Korean culture, added cannabis products, and reached a runway show.

Cookies has run capsules with Starter, the heritage sports jacket brand. Worth noticing how the trade press covered it: the reporting described Cookies as a clothing and accessories brand and did not mention cannabis at all. The trademark strategy worked so well that the weed company became legible to fashion media as a clothing company.

The department store moment came and went quickly. Barneys New York announced The High End in February 2019 and opened it that March on the fifth floor of its Beverly Hills flagship, a 300 square foot shop selling sterling silver grinders, hand blown pipes and $8,850 rolling paper gift sets, with actual THC ordered through a partner brand for delivery. Barneys filed for bankruptcy that August and every store closed by February 2020. Luxury cannabis retail lasted less than a year in a department store and has thrived ever since in streetwear.

The unexamined day is a wasted opportunity. Reflect on what you did, what you learned, and how you can improve.

John Dewey

What a seed company recognizes in all this

We have watched cannabis names become brands from the strange end of the process, because a strain name is the one asset in this industry that nobody can own.

There is no trademark on a cultivar. Anyone can grow something, call it whatever is selling, and put it on a shelf. That is why the DNA studies keep finding the same name attached to unrelated plants in different states, and it is the same gap that pushed Cookies toward class 25 in the first place. The apparel filing was a response to a problem breeders have never solved.

What a seed company can offer instead of a trademark is provenance. Documented parents, a stated cannabinoid range, a stable expression run after run:

• Gary Payton is named after a basketball player in exactly the way a sneaker would be, and it arrives with documented parents instead of a licensing deal.
• Biscotti is a Gelato 25 and South Florida OG cross, dessert-sweet with a heavy finish, and its lineage can be traced instead of claimed.

That is a less glamorous form of ownership than a registration certificate. It is also the only kind available on the plant itself.

Clothing companies that happen to sell weed

Weed merch looks like a lifestyle play and is mostly a legal one. A cannabis brand that cannot register its name, cannot buy ads and cannot ship across a state line ends up selling the one thing that travels freely, which is a hoodie with its logo on it.

The streetwear world had already built the audience, so the two fitted together quickly. And the odd result is that some of the best-known cannabis brands in America are, in the eyes of federal law, clothing companies that happen to sell weed.

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