Purple Christmas Trees and Inexplicable Skulls

Jennifer Kinon, co-founder of the design firm Original Champions of Design, had never smoked weed in her life when she was commissioned to rebrand it. She described the cannabis leaf—one of the most globally recognized symbols in existence—as "a little round Christmas tree." This is either a very good sign or a very bad one, depending on what you think rebranding is actually for.

The project came out of a collaboration with the American radio show Studio 360, and the timing made a certain cultural sense: several U.S. states had just legalized recreational marijuana, and the visual language around it was still stuck in tie-dye and Grateful Dead iconography. The idea was to strip that away. New logo in purple, a set of cookbooks, T-shirts, a collection of emoji called Cannabamoji. The whole thing was called Cannabiotics, which sounds like a probiotic supplement you’d find next to the kombucha.

And then, inexplicably, they added skulls. No one could adequately explain the skulls—not in any of the press around it. The skulls are just there, floating alongside the purple Christmas tree, like a design decision made during a particularly bad brainstorm that nobody had the nerve to question out loud.

What I find interesting isn’t whether the rebrand works—it doesn’t, really—but the impulse itself. The idea that you could take something so culturally loaded, so tied to its own outlaw mythology, and Muji it into wellness-aisle respectability. It’s the same arc that happened with craft beer, with tattoos, with every subculture that gets discovered and flattened into a lifestyle brand. Cannabis was always going to go through this. I’m just not sure skulls were the right opening move.