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The cannabis industry has mushroomed in places that have legalised its recreational use, such as California, where Clement Kwan co-founded Beboe, which sells upscale cannabis products such as US$75 vaping pens and facial masks containing cannabidiol. Photo: Shutterstock

The Chanel of cannabis: founder of luxury marijuana brand Beboe on what fashion taught him about selling drugs

  • The son of immigrants from Hong Kong, Clement Kwan created Beboe in California because he loves ‘the plant, the industry, and everything about it’
  • Its products include rose gold vaping pens, lavender-scented cannabis pastilles, and facial masks and serum containing non-psychoactive cannabidiol, or CBD
Beauty

A few years ago, Clement Kwan was in the awkward position of having to explain to his mother what he really did for a living.

He had just co-founded Beboe, a luxury cannabis brand, and figured he should come clean to his mother, who knew her son was some sort of entrepreneur.

“I said, ‘here’s the deal’, and then I told her not only about Beboe, but also that I grew and sold weed all through college to pay the tuition,” Kwan recalls. “Her reply was, ‘is it illegal?’ I told her it wasn’t, and she’s been fine with it.”

Kwan, whose family is from Hong Kong, certainly upends any conventional stereotypes about people dealing pot. He is elegant, highly educated and speaks fluent Italian – courtesy of the several years he worked with Dolce & Gabbana in Milan.

He has degrees in economics and finance from the University of California Davis and UC Berkeley, and is the former president of luxury e-tailer YOOX, which went on to buy Net-a-Porter.

Cannabis products from luxury brand Beboe.

Somehow, a premium cannabis brand was a natural extension of that. “I love the plant, I love the industry, and I love everything about it,” Kwan says.

“And the true intention isn’t the love of the plant, though. It’s to further the industry. To shake the stigma, and to make a difference.”

On first sight, Beboe could pass for a prestige beauty brand, with its pretty packaging in teal, jade and copper. Do not expect to find roughly rolled blunts or obvious bongs; Beboe fans gracefully inhale micro doses of cannabis from slender rose-gold pens or nibble on lavender-scented pastilles.

Clement Kwan, co-founder of Beboe.

The brand – named after the grandmother of Kwan’s business partner, celebrity tattoo artist Scott Campbell – is so steeped in elegance that in March, Beboe joined a clutch of upscale cannabis-related brands in a section called the High End, in Barneys New York’s Beverly Hills store.

Beboe is well placed to take advantage of the increasingly relaxed rules around the sale and consumption of cannabis; in 2018, California legalised the sale of recreational marijuana (it has been legal for medical use for a couple of decades).

As a result, anyone 21 or older can pop into any number of stores and dispensaries to buy it – although laws mandate that the product cannot cross state lines.

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Kwan concedes that getting over the stigma surrounding cannabis has had its challenges – users are generally regarded as pot-heads and stoners, people who contribute nothing to society. Novices are scared to try it because of the negativity surrounding it. Kwan and Campbell are out to change these notions.

 

“The industry used to be about high potency and low prices. With Beboe, we wanted lower doses that are more expensive and have it be quite bourgeois,” says Kwan.

“When we started telling people our idea, they were like, ‘get out of here’. But then we started getting calls from dispensaries, saying ‘there’s a lady here with a Celine bag and I don’t know what to sell her.’ I said, ‘give her Beboe’.”

When we started telling people our idea, they were like, ‘get out of here’. But then we started getting calls from dispensaries, saying ‘there’s a lady here with a Celine bag and I don’t know what to sell her.’ I said, ‘give her Beboe’.
Clement Kwan

Kwan says he “grew up poor”, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the son of immigrants from Hong Kong who lived in the Chinese-centric suburb of Monterey Park.

His grandfather was the maitre d’ at the long-defunct Trader Vic’s restaurant at the Beverly Hilton, and his father served as the valet attendant there. He says he and his brother were raised to be a “doctor, lawyer, banker” by his “very Chinese mother”.

“My brother fulfilled that for the both of us,” says Kwan, whose sibling is in real estate private equity.  

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“I was in tech and in fashion and my mother didn’t know what that meant and she asked me a lot of crazy questions. I was in banking and I met [Theory Inc CEO] Andrew Rosen, who looked at me and said, ‘You shouldn’t be a banker, you should be in fashion’. He put me in the showroom bringing lunch to retailers and I thought my life was over, that I’d given up being a banker to slave in the fashion business.”

Still, his years in fashion – particularly in Milan – shaped his aesthetic, which in turn eventually yielded Beboe.

“I learned a lot about what fashion really is, about details and aesthetic. Mr Armani was walking around, it’s the home of Miuccia Prada. It was a beautiful experience.”

 

When he met Campbell in 2014, the two “bonded over marijuana and our desire to do something in this space. We wanted to give people something that was prettier looking and of the utmost quality, that people in the fashion industry who were discerning consumers would want.

I said to Scott, ‘Hey, this is my background’. We’d both cultivated the plant. We both had experience in luxury. We put it all together and Beboe was born.”

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The line is about 30 per cent more expensive than more conventional cannabis products; the vape pen, for example yields 100 to 120 puffs and retails for US$75. The pastilles are great at dinner parties and as gifts.

The brand recently launched a skincare offering, a face serum and sheet masks; these contain just CBD (cannabidiol) and not the THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) that is also a component of the cannabis plant and the thing that, well, gets you high.

The skin offerings, as well as the Beboe “Calming” blend pen, have none of the funny stuff, so you can buy, use and travel with them.

The Beboe vape pen.

Which brings Kwan back to what he says he spends much of his time doing these days – educating people about the healing properties of marijuana, and what they can and cannot legally do.

“The subject has a legacy of myths, that it’s a gateway to other drugs, and that’s all because there is a lack of research and resources,” he says.

Beboe is working closely with UCLA’s Cannabis Research Initiative, which was founded last year, and is one of the pioneering programmes in the world in studying the plant and its effects on the human body.

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“We hear stories all the time, how people use it for pain or anxiety or to sleep better, and everyone reacts differently to it, and to each different strain.

“But we market Beboe for fun. You may or may not have an ailment, but it’s really to bring some joy into life. And that itself is a blessing.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: luxury cannabis brand puts a spin on high finance
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