The Beard Bros combine an old-school love for the written word and a strong-rooted connection to cultivation to provide the community with some of the most authentic cannabis commentary available – period. Coming from the world of cultivation, where you’re constantly refining your ability to stay under the radar, to the current media landscape’s oversharing practices have been strange to say the least. So it’s best to start at the beginning and get the story on track.
Bill & Jeff (The Bros) were born in smalltown Pennsylvania (their family actually has ties back to the Declaration of Independence) but spent most of their developmental years in Florida suburb. Developmental in the sense that not only is this where they grew up, but also where they first unknowingly developed their first distribution networks and began to hone their taste for cultivation. But after the heavy hurricane seasons and subsequent housing market crash of the late 2000s displaced their landscaping and architecture businesses the brothers packed up headed West.
Despite having an inclination toward California since childhood, this initial trip only took them as far as Colorado. Taking techniques they had learned through cultivation, they found day jobs (or night jobs rather) managing the reset teams for grocery stores and spending their days building out the Beard Bros name. Hoping to take advantage of the plant’s legality at this time (2010), they were unfortunately shut out through industry closed-looping only six months after their arrival. So they continued on, landing in Los Angeles distributing Mickey Martin’s edibles and developing their editorial edge.
Building brands online continues to be a challenge for the cannabis community, we actually lost our IG account just last week, and the Bros were well ahead of the curve in late 2011. Posting strictly flower, categorized by strain through hashtags, they were able to increase brand awareness and provide dispensaries with a digital lookbook of the product. Take a moment to appreciate the foresight in discarding the traditional lookbook or pitch deck for a virtual timeline offering the opportunity for buyers to see exactly what Sour Diesel looked like at week 6 and throughout its life cycle prior to ending up on their shelves.
After not only growing an audience online, but supporting 30+ SESH events across LA and opening nearly 90% of their initial retailers through the platform they were eventually shut down in December of 2015. And after 3-4 months of working to find the right contact to reinstate the account (we hope the process has been expedited in the last 6 years), they realized that they needed to develop their own platforms.
Freedom and authenticity have dictated the actions of the Bros since inception and these were the traits they drew from in launching their media channels. Living through the “Reefer Madness” era they felt a responsibility to show that the plant had been vilified and to aid in creating an authentic narrative behind its rise to prominence. The Beard Bros website initially featured articles detailing the various how-tos and tricks of the trade they had personally picked up and to this day serves an equally helpful purpose by providing consistent, authentic, no bullshit insights on what matters to the cannabis community. They are a part of the industry, they are in the community and they understand what’s real and what’s fluff.
Their candor has long been welcomed as an alternative to mainstream cannabis media and their weekly newsletter, the Friday Sesh, has been the industry’s equivalent to Kiplinger Reports or Morning Brew since well before 2020 prompted everyone to start curating their own “digital publication.” The Friday Sesh is your weekly state of industry report touching everything from the potential impacts of federal cannabis legalization to emerging research on the medical benefits of psilocybin.
Every Beard Bros channel, from newsletter to flower, pushes for free cannabis. Which, as they describe it, is cannabis that is free from judgement and free to be used. And at this time in cannabis history, where mainstream outlets are moving in on all fronts, undereducated THC-hype drives consumer purchasing habits and med is becoming lost in the wake of click-worthy headlines and celebrity endorsements, nothing could be more important. Subscribe today and free your mind.
