James Valentine, Communications & Content Marketing Manager at Custom Cones USA – Interview Series

Of all the producers of cones and other types of papers and wraps, few companies have turned those product types not only into smoking products but also clever and fully customizable marketing products quite like Custom Cones USA. However in a recently published study from Lake Superior State University in collaboration with Custom Cones USA, it was revealed that many popular printed rolling papers have unsafe levels of heavy metals and other toxic dyes. For a better understanding of this study and the ramifications of it, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with James Valentine, Communications and Content Marketing Manager for Custom Cones USA.

What topics did you initially study at Boise State? Since cannabis legalization was still years away for Idaho’s neighbors, what industries did you mainly study successful marketing tactics for?

In high school, I spent three years in the student Marketing Association DECA alongside my three years of elective courses in marketing, so coming out of high school was pretty clear where my at least fallback would be. I explored biology, ended up in chemistry, and then that kind of tilted my idea. And so I leaned into marketing.

I had kind of taken my time on really making a final call, but did and was really happy with that, though, when it comes to the students of LSSU studying cannabis at their late teens, early 20s, and having just all the spirit in the world and really just understanding that they know what they want and already have a plan and already kind of have their future careers in motion. I don’t feel like I really took advantage of that when I was in school. I was really learning about myself at a personal level.

And that’s one of the things I look back at kind of wish I had was that connection to the connection to not just what I was learning. There’s something about cannabis that brings people together. It’s an interesting field.

It’s an interesting plant. So I wish I had the passion that these folks have that I’ve met when I was younger. There was one brand in Idaho, a local company called Bodybuilding.com that I was always a little bit intrigued by because they were this supplement brand that had a website covered with these, I don’t want to say, enhanced, but enhanced, just massive athletes.

And so I always thought it was very interesting how they were able to resume with folks across the whole fitness spectrum. It’s kind of a lame one, but it always was it always was interesting. I actually don’t know how well they’re doing now, but I think they were one of those brands that carried a lot of products and then created their own line that then became very popular.

And so it was always just really interesting to see how they coordinated their efforts to really just build a build name recognition, even if it was kind of a different brain realm of kind of bodybuilding compared to fitness. I thought that was very interesting. And so moving to higher education.com.

So when I got my job there, that was post-working in restaurants for 10 years and that was post-taking my first desk job, which was a complete disaster, just like an awful workplace. So when I landed at higherucation.com, I was really excited. I had, in my later years in college, had a real interest in the higher education system because it was just kind of this institution of learning, this institution of people finding themselves.

How did you effectively market MBA programs and other educational pursuits through onlineMBA.com and highereducation.com? What was the importance of the educational programs that you provided marketing and SEO for?

I thought it would be an interesting, an interesting path to kind of work in higher education. That was always one of those things that interested me, just people in the in the time of their life when they’re really trying to figure out what they want and do in this world. That always was really unique to me.

And so when I got this job, I was actually really excited. And my, my role at the company when I started was in content marking, so I was developing content, promoting that content and building and building links back to the websites that I’m worked on. And so those pieces of content could range from a scholarship guide for, excuse me, first generation students, it could be a guide to choosing your major, kind of thinking down the funnel how to choose your major information on accounting programs, accounting programs in Washington, online accounting programs in Washington.

It was this was this hub of information across all of these domains that covered the higher education and career landscape to then answer the queries of folks searching for that information online. So historically, you may have seen mailers and you still see these, but billboards, mailers, TV commercials, trying to entice students to enroll and kind of build that name recognition in connection with them. And, I mean, in a world that’s changing and especially technology, those harder to attribute marketing tactics that may have had that may have been effective in the past just for losing their steam.

And so what higher education did was use the power of SEO and just fantastic content and the understanding of kind of how the internet is structured to develop, to develop this extensive range of content that served upper funnel folks. And so you can think of those upper funnel folks as a little less, a little less intent, or excuse me, not intent, further from the transactional point of the funnel. So I always, I always found it interesting what they were doing.

It was building a building a product, you could say, a content product, earning rankings in Google that would then generate traffic that would be desirable by universities. So if somebody was looking for an online MBA program in New York, online MBA programs in New York are going to be interested in folks that are qualified that are coming to your site. And so as folks would develop more of an understanding of getting the information they want, they would end up on more transactional pages that would have requests for information from schools, widgets, and on the back end after that would happen, there was a marketplace of schools that would then buy these leads and then get in contact with those students to help them enroll students.

So it became this generator of high intent links, or excuse me, high intent leads, that would then translate into high enrollment. And so schools really found a took a liking to our organization.

When it came to when it came to the schools that we were working with, this could be a larger school that was just upping enrollment or it could be a smaller school that was trying to build their program while we did have a focus on campus, online students was our bread and butter. It really developed that what we brought to schools was making it easier for them to find prospective students in a world where advertising, just the competition to enroll, it just became so difficult. You could find a way to build a relationship with a third party that then would be able to provide qualified leads that were folks that were looking for information and specifically and oftentimes specific information on that program.

So in the end, managing these websites, the goal is to build traffic and translate that traffic into transactional traffic.

And so top of the funnel, folks that are kind of dipping their toes in the water, um top of the funnel in more volume. And then as you get down towards the bottom, folks looking at more transactional searches, the leads would generate and the company would scale and and just be able to keep growing while they earn the traffic, once earned, it becomes a very valuable asset. So really good learning experience.

I spent about six years there. And then after I spent two or three years in the crypto industry and then moved over to Custom Cones USA.

Prior to joining the Custom Cones USA team, what were some professional highlights and impressive metrics that you reached in your SEO/marketing career? How did you assist vendors and businesses in strengthening their sales?

I’ll highlight one from each role. So at a higher education.com when I was working there, I had I had zeroed in on some Rocky road ahead for onlineBA.com as it sat atop the rankings for high intent transactional keywords, such as general online MBA, online MBA programs in locations. It was a very successful website.

I started there in the early 2010s. And so I had flagged the issues why looking at kind of a competitive analysis, looking at the trajectory of content being created and the coverage getting created on these other sites while our site that really had this kind of exact match domain, as well as a lot of a lot of the key transactional content. It was poised to lose that from people innovating and just doing more.

And so we sat on that site in its current form as it was kind of doing what it should be doing. I mean, what the optimal goal would be. And so after that, the organic traffic value from a monthly perspective, dropped from $2 million.

So the value of the traffic being searched, if somebody’s searching for a transactional term, their value is higher than somebody that’s looking for more general topics that may not lead to a transaction. And so that $2 million turned into a $400,000 monthly traffic value. And so once that moment happened, I was assigned to that website, which was kind of a step in the right direction for me, wanting to move into site management.

And so over the next, let’s say, seven, eight, nine months, I worked on a complete site redesign, a complete side. We did a complete content overhaul. We did a complete profile guide of all of the online MBA programs in the country. 
We did a beginning to-end guide on kind of considering a program all the way through kind of post outcomes after graduation. And we really just made the site focused on being user first. What’s the value of that we’re bringing?

What is going to make this a marketable site? How are we going to educate while also finding our way forward? I’m not exactly sure, but really, the focus was claw back what we had lost.

And over that 10 months, the value got back up to $2.4 million, so it was over what we originally have. But after kind of booing back up, it buoyed back to about where it was around $2 million monthly traffic value. So that was a really, really exciting. really exciting project for me, which then led to me, managing the team that I was working on.

I did that through COVID, all of that, and then took a step back and then moved into the crypto industry. I was really focused on Bitcoin. But while I was there, I had opportunity to go over to Milan, Italy for a global summit to present my growth and organic strategy to folks connected to our projects.

What caught your professional attention about working with Custom Cones USA? From an SEO/marketing standpoint, what is Custom Cones USA doing differently from other wholesale providers/competition in the industry?

The one thing that really, I mean, I had taken, after working at that crypto job and taking my leave, I had I knew I needed a kind of refocus on a career because I wasn’t really caring about the sectors I was in. And so I took a year and a half off and kind of regrouped. I spent like 200 days up in Canada getting tattooed. So I went from no tattoos to a full bodysuit in a year and a half. I knew with like 10 years of experience, that I was going to need to go into an industry that I cared about. And so the focus was joining the cannabis industry.

And so when I did find Custom Cones USA, I did a sweep just kind of the classic background on an organization. But then I also jumped into their website analytics from an SEO perspective and definitely saw the strategies that they used to build, and SEO was definitely foundational in that really drawing the traffic of pre-roll suppliers trying to find exactly what they need, and they did it the right way. And so they kind of came around in 2017, really built up a big presence, and then started their consumer brand.

And so I really saw a lot of opportunity in optimizing and kind of continuing to build a slice of Custom Cones USA and then also saw the opportunity of being able to build a brand like Day Savers. And it was awesome.

I knew about Fred and Harrison’s past. I did a lot of research and saw a lot of the content that they were producing and I wanted to be a part of it. And so what I really like is the way that they were industry leaders, and they were industry leaders through innovating and building in the times that they built at. And SEO was very foundational in attracting that high intent traffic that was then going to make purchases.

The way that they built their brands over time was really exciting. Like when I am at trade shows, I see a lot of other pre-roll cone businesses and I see a lot of tower boxes of 900 paper cones. And that’s really cool, but after looking at Custom Cones USA and looking at the massive offerings, not just pre-rolled cones, but glass tipped pre-rolled blunt tip or glass tip pre-rolled blunts ceramic tip 2-gram refined white joints. So I knew that they were innovators in the space. I knew that they were growing a consumer business, and so I was really just attracted at that.

They differentiated themselves by really focusing on the science behind papers, really focusing on providing folks with the highest quality papers on the market. So it was an easy choice to join the team.

From the marketing/sales angle, how are printed rolling papers utilized and customized? Based on your previous experience with Custom Cones USA, do you believe that custom-printed cones are a successful marketing strategy? Before the study with Lake Superior State University was published, how widespread was the usage of printed rolling papers produced with the harmful soy-based inks among both Custom Cones USA and similar wholesale producers of rolling papers/cones?

I always looked at printed papers as an opportunity to just enhance the visual appearance of a pre-roll. You can customize a filter tip underneath the paper in it. It’s beautiful and it adds a lot of aesthetic value. I’ve seen a printed paper with the subway map of New York and you can get them with just like massive $100 bills. A lot of people will use it for events, like a printed rolling paper with like a pot leaf for 420 or something with hearts for Valentine’s Day. They’re cool, but at the same time, we have to understand that we are going to combust that and who knows what’s in there.

And when it comes to regulations of testing, there’s a lot of regulations around flower. But when it comes to when it comes to pre-rolls, if it’s not tested in its final state, then the then the papers aren’t tested. So when it comes to printed papers with papers not being tested all the time, what would the value be in testing that soy printed papers?

So there’s a reason why they’re out there. They have appeal, and there’s a reason why they’re still out there is because there’s a lack of regulation. And if regulation was in place, would that mean that they would not be around? No, because there needs to be a reason for that. The more you look online, if you’re looking for pre-polling papers, you’ll find anything that that you can or you can pretty much dream up.

What did the LSSU study reveal about the usage of these inks in printed rolling papers and their chemical makeup when combusted? How dangerous and concerning were the results?

Once we started looking up the LSSU survey or study of printed rolling papers, one of the things that really popped out was that this is a precombustion test. So when we’re looking at the levels of heavy metals in these soy inks, we are not saying that this level is 100% going to be harmful because once a joint is combusted, for the chemical reactions that happen, maybe the heavy metals are less in the ash or maybe they’re burnt off. There’s not definitive research on that.

And so the Lake Superior State University study was pretty groundbreaking because it was really the first focusing on finding any harmful contaminants in those printed rolling papers. And so after that study came out, there was definitive research.  Looking at more of the blue, green, and purple soy inks, we were seeing very high levels of copper. So in these printed rolling papers, there were significantly higher concentrations of copper primarily, but also chromium, vanadium, at times silver.

And those levels of blue soy based pigments are used by a number of manufacturers while these products might result in exposures as high as 4.5 to 11 times the maximum exposure limit. So when it comes to these heavy metals present, there is research that says that these levels are too high. Does that mean that those levels are too high when they’re being inhaled? No, because we don’t have that research.

The next stage of this research would be focusing on the combustion reaction and really testing the smoke and doing a combustion test. And so when it comes to eye levels of heavy metals in printed rolling papers, unless the research is there, why would people take action?

And so this kind of first step in bringing that data is the reason that Custom Cones USA instantly dropped those products. We connected with Dr. Derek Wright, the leader of that study over at Lake Superior State University, who also runs the Cannabis Center for Excellence.

We also collaborated with a couple of the cannabis associated students, which was really cool and especially seeing the passion of young folks that are in their studies, passion about what they’re learning, have a future goal, a future plan. And for them to be exploring these topics at such a level of chemistry that I had never really thought went on.

How did Custom Cones USA remedy this unsafe situation with the printed rolling papers and ensure that consumer safety will always be prioritized?

How Custom Cones USA reacted is not necessarily how we would expect everybody to react to data that shows evidence of something. But from the combustion standpoint, if we don’t have definitive data that says it’s dangerous, why not sell the product? And so from our perspective, we saw it as why sell a product that could be potentially dangerous?

And so we immediately dropped those printed papers and then worked with LSSU to talk about why we did that. I think that’s very on brand with the ethos of Custom Cones USA is to look at the science, source the finest materials for pre-rolls, and make sure that if there is any potential for risk, eliminate the risk right away.

And so that’s what we did. When it comes to other producers that still want to produce custom made printed products, I think they are going to really just to look at the science behind what has been studied. Next, they need to look at their values and see if they want to take action by pulling these products based on their potential risks or if they want to continue selling these products because the risk is combustion, and so there’s no definitive data to say that this is necessarily going to impact the health of smokers. And so I think it’s going to be something that over time, the science develops.

And I think that will lead to folks making more informed decisions. There are points of regulation that could be adjusted that make us so that these products do need to be tested at a more at a more high and focused level so that if we are looking at the cannabis flower under a microscope, why aren’t we looking at the material around it that’s also going to be combusted and smoked?

When it comes to focusing on printed papers and soy-based inks, and the data shows that. Producers are going to need to decide what’s more important; visually pleasing joints, or the safest possible joint that they could produce?

If a federal reform such as rescheduling of cannabis were to occur, how would that impact the smoking accessories sector and its large-scale producers like Custom Cones USA? Would some type of regulation be implemented to prevent potentially unsafe errors, such as the soy-based ink issues?

I think that would be I think that would be an intensive process and it would make the industry safer because we do need to study this. We do need to make sure that producers and ancillary businesses are doing right by the consumer and cutting corners is a lot easier when there’s no regulation or looking the other way when potential risks come up. With regulation comes the need for testing and passing those regulations.
And so if people want to find ways to use printed papers with regulation, that’s great. They just need to find a way to do it in a safe manner.

We test all of our smoking accessories to the same standards of cannabis testing. And so, we test all our papers for our papers for pesticides, heavy metals and microbials. If we are really focusing and putting a big stance on offering the highest quality pre-roll accessories out there, that means that we need to just make sure that we’re continuing to take that stand. Consumer safety comes first and preventing risk is more important than guaranteeing that something is risky.

Thank you for joining us, James! For more information on Custom Cones USA, please visit their website.