There’s a running tally on the Nimble website. As of early this week, it showed 34,090 packs of Kites pre-rolls sold and $17,045 donated to NuProject, the Portland-based cannabis social equity organization.
That 50-cents-per-pack donation demonstrates a commitment to social justice that undergirds the distribution and manufacturing company that Joy Hudson and Marissa Rodriguez founded last year after parting with The Sweet Life Distribution, a major Oregon player they ran for several years.
“Here we were, a couple of white women fully able to build a career in this industry, but there were still people in prison for being in the business,” Hudson said. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘How do we participate in repairing the harm?’”
One way is the Kites donations, which have been ongoing since the brand launched last September. Nimble Distribution — formally JHMR Inc. — also seeks to hire former prisoners and has developed an employee stock option plan. And it will peel off more revenue from a new product in the works, called Broomsticks, to support abortion access.
Growing the business: Orchid Essentials licensee in Oregon
Nimble scored what it believes will be a significant partnership this spring when it became the exclusive Oregon licensee for Orchid Essentials, a vape brand out of California. Under the arrangement, Nimble pays royalties on each Orchid cartridge and battery that it sells.
Hudson and Rodriguez know they need a tightly run, aggressively efficient business to make deals like that work, and to sustain their do-gooding. That’s reflected in the Milwaukie company’s pre-roll manufacturing process, which takes advantage of a combination of smart machinery and skilled, dedicated workers to produce a consistent product at lowest cost.
Here’s a look at how that process works.
