BK: What is Ghost Drops?
Travis Fleetwood: We started in the shadows of the legacy market, risking everything and putting everything on the line to help produce accessible, high-quality cannabis for our Canadian cannabis community.
Gene Bernaudo: A former legacy cannabis brand built for enthusiasts by enthusiasts. We have earned a reputation for being expert curators, connecting the dots to deliver the best, most unique, and potent cannabis in the market. As a respected legacy brand house, we collaborate with award-winning legacy growers and cultivators. And our results speak for themselves—we support the experts to create and grow killer product, and in turn we’re able to take that product and provide cannabis connoisseurs with the best small-batch, craft cannabis going.
BK: Nice, but lots of folks make big claims. What makes Ghost Drops different from other cannabis brands?
GB: Ghost Drops brings to the legal market the essence of what the industry has been trying to achieve since its conception in 2018—converting legacy consumers to legal consumers. We know what consumers want and crave. Our key differentiator is taking the same genetics that made us famous in the legacy market and making them available in the legal market. The Ghost Drops model is designed to drop products that change the game and influence the industry, showcasing the talents of our legacy market cultivators and micro-cultivators, growers and extractors.
TF: What we’re doing is we’re bringing the best of the legacy market to the legal market. It’s all about legacy partnerships and collabs. We’ll never abandon our roots—legacy producers helped make us who we are and we won’t ever forget that. That’s in our DNA.
JD: When we started we had one ambition, and though we’ve recently transcended to the legal market, our ambition remains the same: to shine a light on the talent in the darkest corners of the cannabis industry, to highlight the products from the underground legends quietly creating the best, most innovative cannabis.
BK: What’s your backstory, how did the whole thing begin?
JD: Ghost Drops as a brand has been operational since 2017, but our roots—the experience of the founders—go back more than 20 years in many facets of the cannabis industry. We are first and foremost consumers of the plant, but we also have working experience designing and building facilities, consulting in the industry, curating and cultivating, and growing brands.
BK: Why go legal and, importantly, how do you think your customers will respond?
GB: We see it as our duty to make quality cannabis more accessible. Great cannabis used to only be found in the legacy market. But not anymore. We’re working with our collaborators to bring our apex legacy strains to the masses. We’re bringing our legacy market quality and culture to the legal market. We knew the news that we were transitioning to the legal market might shock some of our fanbase. But the reality is the move is being received well—our audience is excited. And that’s because we’re not changing who we are. We’re the same brand with the same great product—the only difference is now it’s easier to get your hands on it.
TF: We’re like an extension of the family, a big part of the legacy community, so of course it’s come as a shock to some of our customer base. But we are doing this for them, for our community, because nobody in Canada is stepping up to do this. It’s all been building to this—we started at the ground level, slowly scaled and worked our way up, building relationships, building friends, building community. Now it’s actually time for our community to rejoice. We’re taking back the cannabis industry from the suits and putting true cannabis legends into the spotlight. We want to change the system—to dismantle stigmas and change the stereotype that legal cannabis is shit.
BK: Has it been hard to crossover?
GB: We’ve assembled a talented team who are more than capable of navigating the tumultuous regulatory environment and ensuring we deliver our message and product in a compliant manner and we’re confident in our ability to hold true to the values that built this brand, while also complying with the regulations.
BK: All while remaining unique?
JD: We went out and picked up the best of the best of the best in the legacy market and brought them together under the Ghost Drops ecosystem. You can’t find what we’re doing anywhere else – we bring exclusive, award-winning genetics straight from the legacy market into the legal, and we bring award-winning cultivators on as consultants for all our legal grows.
TF: We’re going to be converting legacy consumers over to the legal market because we’re demonstrating that legal cannabis quality can set the standard. It used to be that the best cannabis was only found in the legacy market—well, not anymore. We want to change opinions about legal market quality. Everyone knows Canada has the best weed in the world and we want to be the people to actually showcase how great it is. There are a lot of people working to produce good cannabis, but, for the most part, I don’t think what’s out on the market right now is a good representation of what Canada can and should be known for. We’re out to give Canadian consumers the good shit they deserve.
BK: When’s all this new shit dropping?
GB: BC on November 30. Next up will be Ontario in January 2022. For future provincial launches and more on the latest drops, consumers should stay tuned on our Instagram page @ghostdropscanada and our website ghostdrops.com. On the website you can sign up to our Ghostfam mailing list to be the first to know. Covid permitting, we intend to draw four names from our subscribers list to win a VIP experience to our launch event.
BK: Eh, and how about some foreshadowing to what’s coming next?
JD: Two of our most popular strains that consumers know and love: First Class Funk and Z-Splitter, both were hunted by our legacy partner Cultivating Happiness, and commercialized to scale by Mother Labs. We’re excited for consumers to experience all fire legacy strains we’ve got coming down the pipeline.
