MEET FLAMER:
NEW YORKS HOTTEST QUEER WEED BRAND

WYATT HARMS:  Hey, we're just listening to Mariah.

BUDS DIGEST: Oh, nice. What song were you listening to?

MATÍAS ALVIAL: “When I Saw You” by Mariah Carey

BD: Nice. And look, you’ve got a Buds shirt on! I love it.

WH: I just got this, I got it delivered last week.

BD: I saw you guys have cool ashtrays. I want one of those, for sure.

WH: Yeah, we did a limited run with Camila Lim-Hing who is a Brooklyn-based ceramicist.

BD: Tell us a little bit about your background. How did the three FLAMER founders meet?

WH: I worked in media and tech for a while, mostly. And like marketing stuff. I worked at BuzzFeed for a couple of years and I relaunched Buzzfeed LGBTQ and made them a shit ton of money from that and then they refused to invest any of it into actually creating queer content or creating any editorial strategy for the vertical. Which was not only a shitty personnel decision but also a stupid business decision; like they were losing money because they weren't reinvesting in it.

So, honestly, after that experience, I was like, I'm so done with this corporate bullshit world. And then I was hanging out with Khalil at the time. He was in California, growing in Humboldt and he was like, we should do something in cannabis and then have been friends with Matías for a while.

MA: My background is more in the arts. I started marketing but then I kinda somehow got, I don't know, like the arts found me, I guess. I had painted, then I became a photographer just because I was assisting this other photographer. And I don't know that did well for me; like I didn't expect things to happen. I just kind of followed the flow. And basically, I had an artist career. This is kind of how our worlds kind of collided into what Flamer became, but the art world also is shitty. All industries are kind of shitty on their own, right?

But in any case, I think I had a really hard day at work and I don't know, I just kind of felt very sort of disappointed with the industry; the pace of things. So I remember just calling Wyatt out of nowhere and telling him I want to start something.

I knew that Wyatt was more of a business marketing person; like he kind of had more of that brain going. My background was in marketing. So then I was like, hey, I want to do a brand. I don't know what would be a good item to sell. I said cannabis just because it was on the news at the time, it was kind of kind of its legalization, you start seeing it or decriminalization. And then you start seeing it sort of, you know, everywhere in New York. I remember seeing on 4/20 like a cloud above the park. So I guess that was fresh in the mind and you can tell the rest.

WH: So we know each other through activism work. We led this organization called Voices4 which was a queer activist group and we focused a lot on global queer issues. It was formed after the crisis in Chechnya. And Western fundraising media support in person by going to the consulate and protesting if they wanted that.

So, Matías and I became creative partners through that activist group. We ended up splitting off and doing our actions just he and I, and then incorporating a few other friends.

And one of the things that we did, which was the first time that all three of us came together was at the start of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020. Khalil, Matías, and I put up a banner that said, “Pride is a Riot” and we cut down the corporate pride banners at Stonewall. And then that banner stuck throughout, the month of June above Stonewall. But that was the first time that like all three of us actually ever met and hung out together.

Three days later, Khalil left for California. He's always had a background in farming. He's from the Dominican Republic originally and his family has a coffee farm and other kinds of agricultural projects. And so he ended up going to California and spent three seasons growing in Humboldt. At the end of the first season, he was managing the farm. At the end of the next season, he was managing like five farms for the guy that he worked for. And then the last season we were partners on a farm. And so, yeah, he's our cannabis guy.

Part of the reason Matías and I connected, you know, as individuals was because of cannabis; we would smoke after the protest, and then that's how we started hanging out.

MA: The sort of insight that kind of really got the ball rolling was that we wanted to do red pre-rolls. And the way we thought about it was the idea that queerness so much about it is coded. For instance, the handkerchief system is about sort of letting some people know that you belong to a certain group of people without letting the greater group know.

And in a way that's kind of how we thought of Flamer. For instance, the logo has this little triangle, like the Silence Equals Death Triangle. So much about it was an ode to queerness without kind of being in your face, while also being in your face. 

We got this one DM from someone on Instagram being like, “Do they know what that word means?” Like, y'all know, right?

In any case, that's how we found the name Flamer. During that day, we were brainstorming and then we googled, like, gay slurs.

WH: Flamer is a by-product of the community that we come from. That  activist community is very much the ethos of what we're trying to build as well. Every merch thing we want to do is a collaboration with an artist. As we grow up, we expect to do more community events, bringing people together around cannabis. Because I think that's what is missing a lot of times when these corporations, they try to do queer themes and stuff. It's like, they actually don't give a shit about the community. It's just a cash play.

BD: Totally. That's so cool to hear. It's communicating well so far. And I agree. All we wanna do is just like, actually get queer people together. Whether we do it online or wherever.

I know you guys have thrown some parties. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

WH: We did a first big party, which was the first party that had legal cannabis sales in New York. And we had over 500 people show up and it was super fun. It was at Three Dollar Bill which, like, we're always at Three Dollar Bill.

I think it was exactly what we wanted. Every different kind of person there. Queer people but there are also some straight people. There were people from the cannabis industry, people that don't even smoke, that are sober — it's just every different kind of person. People we usually surround ourselves with anyway, but it was cool to see that reflected on a bigger scale. And then we did for 4/20 which was our first kind of public event and we did a picnic at Washington Square Park.

MA: And then they had like… we have so many jays.

WH: Yeah, we had like a bag of jays and at one point just like left it out, and then we couldn't find it and we were like running around like, oh my God, where's the bag of jays? 

MA: I want to keep it sort of always changing. We've been talking about a dinner series. We've also been talking about something for artists specifically. So for instance, like sponsoring a critique or an art show, things like that. Part of what we want is to kind of create this sort of sense of mystery is like, what's gonna be next, you know.

WH: We've done a couple of events with dispensaries as well. So, connecting the dispensaries to their local queer communities is something that we want to do more of. We're in the city but we're also in Albany, Ithaca, like Buffalo. Soon to be at Syracuse. So we're all over New York State now. I think there's a lot of opportunity to connect those local queer people to their dispensaries, especially because I think there's a big hunger for that, in some of those communities, I'm sure.

BD: Very cool that you're in so many different towns already. Congratulations.

WH: We've been driving all over this fucking state. It's a big state.

MA: Yeah, it's so pretty.

WH: I will say that is like it is a very nice drive around. You get all those colors.

BD: So people can find you now in dispensaries in the city and all these other places in New York. What kind of products are you selling?

WH: We have two different strains of pre-rolls right now. It's our Silly Goofy strain and then an Anytime strain. And we're product testing a new strain where the name is not settled, but we're thinking about calling it Lobotomy because it just like…  it lobotomizes you.

So we're doing pre-rolls and then we have a partnership with a farmer who will be supplying us with whole flower. Then we'll also be launching our rolling papers as well.