The hip-hop artist turned billionaire businessman hit the California market with his first cannabis products.
There’s no longer a reasonable doubt that Jay-Z is now a player in the cannabis industry. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter’s high-end cannabis brand Monogram launches its first products in California on Thursday with a four-strain line of craft, indoor-grown cannabis flower and joints. The company’s flagship product is the “OG Handroll,” a 1.5-gram joint rolled by “highly trained artisans,” the company says, that use a technique Monogram developed over a year. The joint is made with small batch flower and is supposed to burn like a premium cigar. And it retails for nearly twice as much at $50. Monogram’s cannabis strains—named No.88, No.96, No.70 and No.01 and developed by veteran grower DeAndre ‘De’ Watson —come in three strengths, “light,” “medium,” and “heavy.” Michael Auerbach, the founder and chairman of Subversive Capital Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company that announced a deal to acquire Jay-Z’s Monogram and California cannabis company Caliva last month, says Jay-Z is not just a front man for the brand. “He’s a real executive, he’s not some ancillary ambassador who says something nice about us once a year,” says Auerbach. “He’s the tip of our spear who’s building out our house of brands, like he has done with Aces of Spades and D’Ussé.” In 2019, Jay joined Caliva as its chief brand strategist, where he developed Monogram. In November 2020, Auerbach’s SPAC announced a deal to acquire Caliva and Monogram, which was a joint-venture between Jay-Z and Caliva, and Left Coast Ventures, which owns musician cannabis brands like Marley Natural and Carlos Santana’s Mirayo.
