Pilgrim Soul is a cannabis lifestyle brand.
Pilgrim Soul
- The cannabis lifestyle brand Pilgrim Soul just raised a $2 million seed round.
- The round was backed by top cannabis investors like Merida Capital Holdings and Beehouse.
- CEO Shawn Gold says the company is focused on cannabis-fueled creativity.
Shawn Gold says he’s used cannabis throughout his career to enhance his creative abilities.
As the chief marketing officer at companies like Myspace, Lowell Herb Co., and TechStyle Fashion Group, Gold said he had to imagine new process systems and structures and think of creative solutions to complicated problems.
Shawn Gold is the founder and CEO of Pilgrim Soul.
Pilgrim Soul
The way he did that, he said, was doing his homework and then using cannabis to help make nonlinear connections and rethink things from different perspectives.
“Cannabis has been a real aid in creative thinking for me,” Gold said. Now, he’s focused on building a “tool set” to help others do the same, he said.
Enter Pilgrim Soul, a cannabis lifestyle brand that Gold founded in 2019 to home in on what he says is the creativity enhancement that cannabis consumption can bring about.
The startup, which sells cannabis vapes in California and ancillary products like creative journals across the US, just raised a $2 million seed round from top cannabis investors like Merida Capital Holdings and Beehouse. Meaningful Partners and Michael Diamant, the founder of Skip Hop, also participated in the round.
A large chunk of the funds and revenue from sales, $1.2 million, will go toward Gold’s area of expertise — marketing and advertising. About half a million dollars will go into cannabis inventory, while about $400,000 will go toward noncannabis inventory, according to Gold, who shared the startup’s budget breakdown with Insider. The remaining dollars will be split among content and design and people.
The startup’s first product on the market wasn’t a cannabis product at all. It was a notebook called the Creative Thinking Journal, which encourages people to journal after they’ve used cannabis.
Gold told Insider he originally thought the journal would be a “breakeven giveaway thing” to gift to customers who bought the company’s cannabis products. But the company rethought revenue plans amid the pandemic and wound up selling about $5.8 million worth of journals in 15 months. Today, it offers several varieties of journals and other stationary materials for cannabis consumers.
Those journals have become a prospective gold mine for Pilgrim Soul, which is hoping to be a national cannabis name.
Gold said there were 120,000 or so customers in his database who had bought the company’s noncannabis products and opted in to receiving content from the brand.
He said that strategy would pay off as the company looked to license its products around the country.
“Part of the benefit of doing a licensing deal with us would be like, ‘Here’s 20,000 customers who like to get high and be creative in New York or in Michigan,'” he said. “Anybody who buys our journal is saying, ‘I like to get high and be creative.’ So they’re already prequalified with our cannabis products.”
Below are some of the key slides from Pilgrim’s Pride pitch deck.
Take a look at Pilgrim Soul’s pitch deck below:
The cannabis lifestyle brand Pilgrim Soul, founded in 2019, just closed a $2 million seed round using this pitch deck.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The brand’s founder, Shawn Gold, has an extensive background in marketing and tech. In 2017, he entered the cannabis space and has worked with companies like MedMen and Lowell Herb.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Gold says the company’s focus is on “creative performance” and its products — a creative journal to use “while high” and a line of vape products — are specifically designed with that in mind.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The round was backed by top cannabis investors such as Merida Capital Holdings and Beehouse.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Gold says he’s used cannabis for creativity throughout his career.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Pilgrim Soul says its brand targets the “creative class”: those who use creativity to both create art and solve problems at their jobs.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The creative class includes artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists, according to the startup.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Gold wants to build a “tool set” to help customers enhance their creativity while using cannabis.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The startup markets cannabis as a means to enhance creative thinking.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The company has a line of cannabis blends that it developed in partnership with Abstrax Tech, a cannabis-research and product-development company in California.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The resin brands, according to Gold, are designed and marketed toward different people and experiences.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Here’s a look at the company’s cannabis products available in California.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Pilgrim Soul says it focuses heavily on search-engine optimization around “cannabis and creativity.”
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The company’s first product on the market was its Creative Thinking Journal, which encourages people to journal after they’ve used cannabis.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
The company says it offers a variety of products, platforms, and content.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Every ancillary product that Pilgrim Soul offers, Gold says, “enhances the efficacy of creativity while on cannabis.”
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Pilgrim Soul’s name comes from a William Butler Yeats poem. Gold says about 25 years ago, he used the poem to “seduce” his now-wife.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Gold also performed a dramatic reading of the poem for Insider during an interview for this story.
Pilgrim Soul says it supports artists from marginalized groups with arts-endowment programs.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
A look at the Creative Thinking Journal: Martin Lawrence Edition.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Pilgrim Soul said it brought in $5.8 million in revenue in the first 15 months of sales.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Gold says he has plans to expand to other markets in the US through licensing deals in the coming years. This map depicts each market Pilgrim Soul is looking to enter and at what times.
Pilgrim Soul
Pilgrim Soul outsources manufacturing to a third party, which pays the company a licensing fee in California.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
This, according to Gold, helps hedge risk and allows the company to maintain banking relationships even though it’s known for being a cannabis company.
Because Gold has an extensive background in marketing, he wanted to design the company in a way that actively reflected the way today’s consumers buy and share cannabis.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Pilgrim Soul says its competitive advantage is due to multiple factors, including its social-media strategy, ancillary products, and product line.
Pilgrim Soul Pitch Deck
Read the original article on Business Insider 
