Sleek designs, calibrated visual identity… Forget the green leaf in clipart mode! In countries that have buried weed prohibition, weed bags are now available in pop or pastel palettes, adorned with funky, cosmic typography. Is the weed bag on its way into the pantheon of pop culture? All the signs are green…
By Doria A.
Across the Atlantic, weed is no longer just a product or a taboo: it has risen to the status of a lifestyle, beauty and well-being ingredient, at the heart of a deeper quest: to reconnect with nature and oneself. A cultural revolution reminiscent of the hippie movement of the late 1960s.
Gone are the cheap, anonymous plastic bags, welcome to the era of arty weed bags! Saturated colors, groovy lettering, psychedelic or retro-futuristic vibes… the bags draw as much inspiration from pop and disco posters as they do from blaxploitation cinema. The result? Slamming packaging that does more than just pack weed: it accompanies a long-awaited cultural revolution.
A symbol of counter-culture and anti-system, cannabis has gone through the looking glass and carries a lot of weight. In the United States, the legal cannabis industry reached $33.84 billion in 2024 – and could flirt with $69.25 billion by 2029 (Mordor Intelligence, 2023). A CAGR of 15.40% that makes your head spin.
Franco-American photographer Vincent Pflieger captures this transition like no one else. With his exhibition “0.125OZ – A Brooklyn Story on Cannabis Design”, presented in Paris in 2024, he plunges into the aesthetics of the abandoned pouches on the sidewalks of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Through this immersive series, collected in a collector’s book produced by Favoreat Design, he documents the shift from an underground market to a mainstream, legal industry – immortalizing these pouches that have become little fragments of culture, scattered with the wind.
As he sums it up: “All the strata of pop culture can be found on these pouches: from the Simpsons to Picasso, from street tags to Tom and Jerry. It’s a real patchwork of references, accessible to everyone.”
In this visual game, Cookies has established itself as the benchmark brand. Founded by rapper Berner and grower Jai Chang, it boasts XXL figures: 50 stores, estimated sales of $440 million, and a graphic identity as recognizable as a Louis Armstrong hit. Their signature? An eye-catching electric blue, and pouches blending street art, pop culture and cosmic nostalgia.
Cookies’ visual identity is not just stylish, it also draws on cutting-edge references from the US underground. In this case, that of the “vipers”, the Chicago jazzmen who rocked the marijuana-filled clubs of the 1930s. Cookies doesn’t just sell weed: it sells a story, a vibe, a piece of counter-culture that’s gone mainstream!
The breeding ground of pop culture
The weed pouch has metamorphosed into a miniature canvas – a pocket art canvas that can be seen on the streets. Once on the sidewalks of Brooklyn or New York, these pouches don’t “dirty” the street, they tell its story. They become fragments of urban art. Like an echo of the origins of street art, they celebrate marginalized and stigmatized cultures, propelling them into the public eye.
Vincent Pflieger expresses it with passion: “In their raw state, these pouches are like little jewels that shine in the midst of urban chaos. It’s in this dirt (sidewalks, gutters, sometimes even mud and garbage) that they catch the eye, like unexpected visual treasures. He himself picks them up, cleans them and immortalizes them in the studio on a white background, to reveal their stigma and unique aesthetic. “For me, it’s an archiving process. I want to capture not only their beauty, but also their history, their passage through the streets and their role in contemporary culture.”
Like tags and graffiti, pouchons bear the hallmarks of an underground culture – a culture that doesn’t apologize, but asserts itself. And then, in a pop and psychedelic version, these pieces of plastic are so many nods to the history of the margins: where everything began, where everything remains possible.
Could the pouch, that little rectangle of disposable plastic, become a collector’s item? Vincent Pflieger has no doubt: “It’s a bit like Pokémon cards, a little ‘collectible’ that I was looking for at the start. Each pouch tells a story, and some of the models I’ve found only cross paths once, which makes them all the more unique.”
Memes, logos and subversive marketing
Welcome to the era of the pochon-mème, where irony is as easily imprinted on plastic as it is on the consumer’s memory. In France, however illegal cannabis may be, it is traded in irreverent packaging. Bearing names like “Haribeuh” or “Nutellhash” (our article, p. X), these pouches do much more than contain weed: they become the ultimate subversion of a banned product, corporate visuals straight out of Internet culture. Yesterday, weed was sold in the anonymous prudence of a plastic bag or a Ziplock; today, it is proudly displayed in offbeat packaging, the stamp of networks that no longer hide.
A trademark wink that’s not without consequences: recently, the Pochette surprise case shook the French courts, and had the audience giggling: 18 defendants, including the Pochette surprise collective, the creators of these inspired pouches. They found themselves on trial for counterfeiting trademarks registered by the parent companies of their hijackings. A first that opens up a crucial debate: at what point does creative misappropriation become infringement? In an age when visual sampling is everywhere, from ironic T-shirts to cultural remixes, where do we draw the line between homage and violation?
What’s most noticeable is that the weed pouch has made a place for itself in pop culture, and not just on the sly. These pouches, veritable plasticized memes, surf on immediately recognizable visual codes. They hijack universal symbols to explode them. A simple typography is enough to trigger an avalanche of references. In a visual pirouette, the pouch goes from marginal product to cultural artefact, driven by humor and maliciously calculated provocation.
Perhaps it’s not just marketing, but the drug side of an aesthetic revolution. These designs draw as much from food brands as they do from the great artistic movements. Imagine Claes Oldenburg, the sculptor of everyday objects, confronted with a “Nutellhash” pouch. He, who has elevated the banal to the status of monument, would see in these bags the very essence of his work: to transform triviality into a cultural icon. But where Claes Oldenburg played with giant sculptures, the pouches are scattered across sidewalks, transforming streets into ephemeral art galleries.
The pouch has become a visual statement. On the one hand, it defuses the forbidden with irony and a wink. On the other, it crystallizes a booming industry, where every design is a strategic weapon. It’s no longer just a piece of plastic: it’s a canvas, a manifesto, a mirror of our age where everything is remixed and monetized. The pouch is ultimately pop art in kit form!
References to Rick and Morty or The Simpsons anchor these pouches in our daily lives. But these designs go further: they tell the story of a culture that appropriates humor, banality and irreverence to better assert itself. Weed, once subversive, becomes the medium of a pop work in its own right, without losing any of its DNA.
The visual intoxication of the bottle
Herein lies the irony of our times: art and marketing merge into one another, blurring the boundaries between subversion and commercial strategy. Could weed pouches, simple containers turned cultural totems, claim the same iconic status as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans? This question goes beyond the simple object to touch on an aesthetic in which irony reigns supreme – a formidably effective marketing tool.
But this approach is not totally new. In fact, it harks back to the transgressive spirit of the 1970s, when détournement, derision and visual audacity were weapons of the counter-culture. Except that today, these tools are used not to spread revolt, but as the emblem of a quiet revolution: that of an industry which, while surfing on the codes of the fringe, is now asserting itself in broad daylight, mainstream and proudly pop.
These pouches tell the story of a tension, a delicate balance between asserted authenticity and inevitable standardization. As Vincent Pflieger puts it: “Generic pouches are often misappropriated, but they also tell the story of an industry in transformation. We’re moving from a world of small, anonymous producers to a world of big brands and chains, with much more calibrated designs”. Where only a short time ago, pouches were raw objects, always irreverent, they are now becoming manufactured products, increasingly shaped to fit into a globalized market. This evolution marks a transformation of weed culture itself. “We’re entering the adult age of cannabis: designs have become more sober, more minimalist. Weed culture is moving away from its flashy, irreverent adolescence and adopting a more serious, pared-down aesthetic”, explains Vincent Pflieger.
Does this sobriety mark weed’s passage from underground icon to fully-fledged product of the cultural and commercial industry? Certainly. But also a sign of the times, when the container is as highly prized as the content, and the bottle as important as the intoxication.
Article published in ZEWEED magazine #7
