Evelyn Wang
“My biggest challenge and goal is to prove I can appreciate cannabis culture and simultaneously bring best practices that will drive Papa & Barkley’s scale to the next level of growth.”
We begin Asian Heritage Month with Evelyn Wang, CEO of Papa & Barkley. When I first entered the cannabis industry, I found very few faces that looked like me, and when I did, I would run over and introduce myself, shaking their hands and asking for their cards. Now six years later, I am so proud to be featuring Evelyn, the first in a series of powerful Asian American women in the C-suite of major cannabis companies. Evelyn came from the beauty industry to cannabis, and she brings her laser-like insights on building “forever” brands to make the cannabis market a juggernaut that I know it will be.
As more women enter the industry, they will see strong women like Evelyn, leading the way and dispelling any stigma or propaganda attached to cannabis with education, outreach, and skilled marketing. I am proud and honored to feature Evelyn Wang on AACE. - Ophelia Chong
As a rare sight (but growing) an Asian female CEO in the cannabis industry is to be the outlier, have you felt any need to prove yourself over what a more typical CEO would have to do? Or have you found acceptance in this remarkable industry known for “outliers”?
So far, people have been more concerned with whether someone from an established industry like beauty/CPG can understand the complex nuances of the cannabis industry. My biggest challenge and goal is to prove I can appreciate cannabis culture and simultaneously bring best practices that will drive Papa & Barkley’s scale to the next level of growth. In terms of being an Asian female CEO, my experience to date has been that people have been very welcoming of this. Most people in cannabis tend to be individuals who are accepting of things that are not always the norm in the first place! My hope is that my presence also inspires others to trailblaze into new realms.
Your career has covered health and beauty and education, with that experience how will you bring Papa and Barkley to the mainstream and how will you differentiate it for different markets?
Beauty is all about product demo – build a plan around showing the consumer that something works. The more audience you have testifying to a product’s efficacy, the better that product will do. Papa & Barkley is perfectly positioned to leverage this type of go-to-market plan. Our founding story around our original - and still best-selling topical pain balm - is, in fact, a testimonial from our founder Adam Grossman; the pain balm Adam cooked up for his father’s debilitating back pain worked and helped his father get out of bed! The Releaf Balms we sell today are extremely similar to that first balm.
The fact that the brand was founded on a son’s quest to find a pain relief solution for his own father is an incredibly relatable story. Papa & Barkley is already well-positioned to speak to a broad audience, and that’s a big part of what attracted me to the brand in the first place.
The premise of scaling audience and testimonials is something applicable across all our market channels, and the difference by channel is how you direct the traffic. In the California dispensary channel, it’s about tapping into that audience and directing traffic into the store. We are unique in that we also have national retail and DTC business, and so that becomes about directing traffic to transact online or at a national retailer.
Tell us the story of how you educated your mother to Papa & Barkley? (this is a story that needs to be told because it's how we should teach the general public)
I’d told my mom I was going to start working at Papa & Barkley, a cannabis company. She congratulated me on my new role and didn’t comment too much on the company. After spending so many years in Canada, I figured perhaps she was more open to cannabis. Then I noticed she would bring up nonsequiturs about hearing stories about children dying of drug overdoses. After a few of these random conversations, I directly asked her why she was bringing up these stories. Was she concerned about what I was doing at Papa & Barkley?
I told her the founding story about Adam Grossman formulating the first product to ease his own father’s pain. I then showed her different products from our portfolio and made analogies to similar products that are staples of many Taiwanese households. For instance, I likened our pain balm to Tiger Balm and our transdermal patches to Salonpas. I explained that Papa & Barkley’s mission is to show how we can unlock the power of the cannabis plant to improve people’s lives. She really got it. She actually thanked me for explaining everything in detail to her. I haven’t heard a random story about drug overdoses since. This story exemplifies the power of a brand like Papa & Barkley to contribute to the normalization and de-stigmatization of cannabis. We are very approachable, which unlocks the ability for people to understand cannabis in a new way.
Links:
Papa & Barkley - THC
Papa & Barkley - CBD
Evelyn Wang - Linkedin