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Cannabis blister packs display product

This cannabis oil producer and vape pen cartridge seller streamlined its packaging by standardizing its biggest-volume products around a single family of blister packs with cardstock.

A cartridge containing cannabis oil for use in a vape pen is displayed through a transparent blister pack. Jake Berry contends that his premium product works best in a package that consumers can see and interact with.
A cartridge containing cannabis oil for use in a vape pen is displayed through a transparent blister pack. Jake Berry contends that his premium product works best in a package that consumers can see and interact with.

Pyramid Pens opened five years ago in Colorado to fill a specific need. Partners Jake Berry, CEO, and Coley Walsh, CFO, both come from marijuana grow and dispensary backgrounds, so as pioneers in cannabis, they were able to identify gaps in the market that others might not have seen. Soon after Colorado’s Amendment 64 passed legalizing recreational cannabis in 2012, the pair was quick to recognize and address the lack of variety in the cannabis vaporizing (vape) market.

“The landscape was stagnant. You could only buy vape pens from one or two companies, and the quality wasn’t there, at least not at an affordable price,” Berry says. “Another thing I saw was that nobody was branding very well with their packaging.”

Supermarket-trained consumers are used to a certain level of professionalism in the packaging with which they interact. It engenders feelings of safety and trust in the product within. That was missing in the vape pen marketplace.

“Plus, the biggest expense for companies like us is labor force. Our goal was to limit our labor force, pay them a little bit better to lower that turnover rate—this industry’s turnover rate is incredibly high—and keep our expenses down. The only way we could see doing that was by figuring out innovative, streamlined packaging solutions that would work for the whole product line.”

Primary product lines
Pyramid Pens’ bread-and-butter products are cartridges, filled with cannabis extract, designed to be loaded into vape pens and vaporized (consumed). Many consumers consider these cartridges single-use and simply discard spent cartridges. But Pyramid recognized that these cartridges could be reloaded with a syringe-like refilling device. This refill product became popular with more price-conscious consumers; however the China-sourced cartridges remain the lion’s share of sales. But according to Berry, it was the secondary packaging that was the major drawback of early packaging iterations since it effectively hid the attractive product from the consumers’ view.

“The product we sell is a high-priced item. It’s one of the highest-priced items in a dispensary, actually,” Berry says. “I want the customer to be able to see and understand what they’re buying. They’re about to spend 40 to 60 dollars on one of these products, so we need to make them feel comfortable purchasing it.”

Eschewing the bulky, child-resistant boxes their competitors had used, Berry sought to employ a transparent blister pack. An extra benefit of this pack would be the small size—competitors’ boxes were difficult for dispensaries to hold in inventory because such facilities tend to be tight on space.

Adventures in sourcing
But despite all of Berry and Walsh’s experience in cannabis, neither had any experience in sourcing packaging. They initially turned to a packaging consultant—Berry calls them “a middleman group.”

“We really weren’t happy with the quality of things. The printing on the packages was different than what we were led to believe. It wasn’t what we wanted, and it was purchased the cheapest way possible. Still, we paid more money than what we should’ve paid for a similarly priced product since we were going through a packaging service, essentially,” Berry says. “I decided that I would be more prepared and take much more control over my next foray into packaging. We needed to find our own supplier, one we could be happy with that could achieve a better-looking product for the consumer. I started researching—figured out what blister packs were, where cards fit in. I needed to find a company that could manufacture these blister packs specifically for us. That’s how I came across Transparent Container Company [TCC].”

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